


An Ocean Between

by mimsical



Series: there is a house by the sea and an ocean between it and me [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abduction, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society (Homestuck), Alternian-typical Intercaste Atrocities, Background Relationships, Captivity, Friendship, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Dehumanization, Implied/Referenced Torture, Lost Love, M/M, Magic-Users, Medical Experimentation, Past Character Death, Reunions, Trans Character, Trans Dirk Strider, Transgenerational Trauma, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 03:32:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11546601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimsical/pseuds/mimsical
Summary: Thunder is rippling over the sea the night Jake English comes back into your life.





	1. storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wooo /wiggles fingers. hey guys, new fic! i've been jumping around between ideas for what i was going to write next so i landed on "make it as ocean as possible."

Thunder is rippling over the sea the night Jake English comes back into your life. Your evening has been spent keeping an eye on the impending storm, tracking the growing accumulation of stormclouds on the distant horizon. When you go outside to make certain the woodpile is covered securely, the wind has picked up, occasionally buffeting you with such strong gusts that you almost worry about losing your footing. Night falls quicker than usual, even for winter, with the storm darkening the sky. You build up the fire and make certain you have enough wood indoors before the first raindrops fall. 

You’ve finished dinner, washed up, and are settling down in front of the fireplace with a pair of socks that need darning when lightning cracks over the ocean, a shock of light so bright and close you can hear the crack of thunder almost simultaneous with the light. 

Then someone is pounding on your door. 

You jump up, startled. Your nearest neighbors are within walking distance, but not near enough for one of them to come visiting on a night like this unless they were stranded nearby. When you throw open your front door you are met by the sight of heavy, lashing rain, and Jake, soaked to the bone. 

You freeze to the spot, mouth working soundlessly, but Jake pushes past you and slams the door shut. He turns to you, wild-eyed. “We have to bar the doors and windows,” he says. “She’s trying to follow me — please. Please, help me.” 

You stare at him, a ghost incongruously dripping on your wooden floorboards. You nod. 

Jake raises a hand and presses it to the door. A sigil forms on it, spreading out from his palm, glowing as bright as the lightning but much warmer in tone. It’s so powerful that you stagger half a step back. The light fades from leaving only a dancing afterimage on your retinas and charred marks burned into the door, but it’s sharp in your memory without you even needing to try to remember it. 

“The doors and windowsills,” Jake repeats. “Hurry.” 

You find your knife in its usual spot in your bedroom and scratch the sigil as precisely as you can into the windowsills there, and then drag a stool into the bathroom to brace yourself awkwardly on tip-toe to carve the same mark on the shower’s skylight. When you scramble back into the main room Jake is most of the way through the kitchen, and you finish the last few windows with flashes of lightning making you jump and thunder rolling overhead so loud it rattles the knickknacks on the windowsill. Jake burns the final sigil onto the back door and waits, looking petrified with fear. 

There’s another lightning strike and a startling crash. The next strike comes and you count one second before the thunder. The next is three seconds, then seven. The rain lightens. 

Jake sighs out all his breath at once, slumping forward onto the door. “Christopher cringlefucker, that was close,” he says. “Thank fuck. Thank you.” 

You find your voice. “What the hell was that?” 

“It’s…” Jake pushes himself off the door only to turn around and slump back on it, facing more towards you. “The sea witch. She’s been holding me captive all this time. I barely escaped, and she tried to chase me here. She’s got this whole horrible skookum house under the sea...” 

You shake your head. “Sea witch? I don’t… You don’t mean…” 

“The very same, I’m afraid.” Jake runs a hand through his hair, ruffling where it had been slicked down with water. “I know we thought she was gone for good. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but she’s up and kicking with some dreadfully strong flippers.” His eyes flicker over your face. “You changed your hair.” 

You can’t… you can’t begin to process this. “Lots of things change with time,” you say, and Jake winces. “The witch. The Empress. I should… I need to tell Roxy. And Jane. They’ll need to know. She followed you here, right. So she’ll know where I live. She might come back, and then, what? I’ll have to fend her off? How long will those sigils last?” 

Jake glances around the room. “Few weeks, at least. But she’ll be keeping her eye on here, yeah, trying to blast through. I’m sorry to have lead her here, but… It’s closest to the sea. She’d have caught me if I tried to go farther.” 

“So you wouldn’t have come here if there’d been a quicker option,” you say, meaning to inflect it as a question but not managing it. “I’m going to send a message to the girls.” 

“Dirk,” Jake says, taking a step closer to you, but you put your hands up as if to ward him off and all but run to the safety of your bedroom. The door slams shut behind you and you have to brace yourself against the bed to keep your footing. Roxy, Jane. The message paper is on the dresser, next to some of your other magical odds and ends. You replace your ritual knife while you’re at it and try to think of what to write. 

_ Jake’s back. He says so is the Empress. _ There’s no room for anything more, but you don’t have any more you can think to say. You light a match and blow each message into the flame and they disappear in a snap of sparks. The match burns down to your fingers before you recover your senses and blow it out. Then you just sit down on the side of the bed and put your head in your hands, trying to recover your senses. You breathe through the sharp bite of anguish in your chest, the physical pain of Jake’s presence. You think maybe you’d forgotten the exact cadence of his voice. 

There’s a soft  _ snap! _ in the room, and a tiny flash of sparks. You put out a hand and catch the message as it floats down. 

Jane’s handwriting says,  _ I’ll be there by first light. _ You crush the message into your fist and bring both your arms to your chest, nearly doubling over. 

There’s a quiet knock on your bedroom door. “Dirk?” Jake calls. 

You force yourself upright, dropping the little paper to the floor. Jake’s face is in shadow, illuminated from behind by the firelight. 

“You have to believe me,” he says without preamble. “Please, Strider, I did my best to get away. This is the first time I had any success at staging a break for it. I’ve been trying to come home all this time. It was such a horrible place.” He shudders. “You wouldn’t believe half the dreadful things she does. I wasn’t the only one she had down there, either, it’s trolls and humans both and she’s got some awful power that keeps you alive…” 

He trails off when you hold up a hand. “It’s late,” you say, and your voice is scratchy but you’ll manage. “Jane will be here tomorrow and we’ll decide what to do then.” 

Jake looks lost. He’s still dripping and at this proximity you can smell brine on him. 

“There’s towels and blankets in the linen closet,” you say. “You can… I’ll see you in the morning.” 

Jake tries to reach toward you but you step back, unshakably, irrationally certain that you’ll shatter into a thousand pieces if he touches you. “Goodnight,” you say, and your voice is more strangled than anything else but you close the door in his face without another word. 

You stay there, listening, for a few long moments, until you hear Jake’s defeated footsteps trudging away. Only then do you back away. You sit down on your bed again and wrap your arms around yourself. After a some minutes you stop hearing any noise from the other side of the door. For most of the night, sleep is the farthest thing from your mind. At some point you do go through the motions of getting undressed and ready for bed but you lay restless and sightless in the dark, listening to the rain fade into dripping and then just into night noises, the faint roar of waves in the distance. You almost want to check that Jake really is in the other room, but you force yourself to stay still, turning over his words in your mind and all your knowledge of the Empress. 

Towards dawn you slip into a half-dream state, your memories mingling together to create a strange dream, where your dead brother’s face morphs into Jake’s and then back again, voice always just barely too quiet to hear. When you sit up with light trickling into the room, you feel not a whit rested, and your eyes feel practically crusted over. But there’s two voices in the next room. 

You get dressed methodically and venture out. Jane has taken reign of your kitchen, and the sight of Jake sitting looking cowed at the table is a dull blow to your stomach. 

“There you are,” Jane says. “I made breakfast.” She holds something out to you. Two somethings. 

You cross the room, acutely aware of Jake’s eyes following you, and take the small circular wafers. The first is an wakefulness charm. Most edible charms have the consistency and flavor of edible chalk, heavy and gritty in the mouth, best washed down by as much water as possible. Jane makes hers with sugar and vanilla and you pop it in your mouth and chew. The second wafer is a sleeping charm. 

“If I know you, Strider, and I do, you didn’t sleep hardly a wink. Go put that at your bedside so you have no excuse about taking it tonight,” Jane says briskly. “Then come back and get something to eat, and we’ll discuss this bag of messy nonsense that’s been dumped on your doorstep.” 

In your peripherals, Jake winces. “Thanks,” you say, and retreat once again. This time you notice the scrap of paper on your dresser. It’s a note from Roxy that must’ve arrived during your singular hour of sleep. 

_ gonna need a min to ditch this wild arctic partay but ill be there ASAP hang on,  _ it reads. Roxy’s handwriting is tiny and scribbled, half the message on the back of the paper. It takes you a second to decipher “arctic partay.” 

You return to the main room. “Roxy’s on her way,” you report. “There’s going to be a travelling delay, though.” 

“Good,” Jane says, and Jake mumbles something along those lines as well. “If the Empress is involved then she deserves to be a part of the solution.” She thumps a plate of some sort of egg and greens scramble down at the table and you sit. Jake is nudging his one remaining leaf around his plate with his fork and is slumped over to rest on his other palm. He makes no big secret of staring at you as if starved and your features his only nourishment. Jane makes herself her own plate and sits as well. 

“So,” you say, and are relieved by the steadiness of your voice. “The Empress.” You take a bite of your eggs and if you’re studiously avoiding eye contact with Jake, well, sue you. 

Jake sits up a little straighter. “Yes. Her Imperious Condescension, not even half as dead as any sane fellow would hope. Seems that she’s been biding her time beneath the waves. Lying low, so to speak.” 

“With a collection of prisoners,” you prompt. 

Jake nods a few times in rapid succession. “Yes, she’s got some sort of experiment running. She has magic that lets her gift her poor victims breath even as they swallow saltwater, but as far as I gathered she was trying to cause some sort of… mutation?” 

Jane frowns and drums her free hand on the table. “Wasn’t she terribly opposed to mutations?” she objects. “There was all that fuss over troll blood color we learned about in history classes.” 

“Yeah, and I think that still stands, she certainly made enough derogatory comments whenever I lost too much blood in her presence for it.” Jake speaks with terrible casualness. “But as far as I gathered, especially from the trolls in her keeping, she’s trying to recreate gilled trolls. Trolls that can breathe and live underwater, like her.” 

Jane sucks in a breath, and then blows it out in a huff. “But wasn’t she the one who did away with sea trolls in the first place?” 

You think Jake shrugs across the table. “I suppose. Never paid much attention to history books.” 

“She was,” you confirm. “Big fuckin’ mess, about a century or so back. Sabotaged the troll’s Mother Grub.” You shove more eggs in your mouth before you can do something dumb like accidentally look at Jake. 

“So she wants to bring them back now,” Jane concludes. “You don’t have gills now, do you?” 

“Hm? Oh, no. Definitely not. Not for lack of trying, but no.” Jake rubs his neck as if from phantom pain, and then catches you looking. You focus on scraping up the last bits of breakfast. 

“We need Ro-Lal,” Jane sighs. “She could tell us the science of this.” She sets down her fork and you snag her plate. 

“I’ll wash up,” you say. 

“No, Jake will, I want to talk to you,” Jane says, with sudden fierceness. Jake doesn’t protest, just reaches for your plate. You lean back without thinking and then try to force yourself to relax. Jake leaves the table and you hear the sink start running a moment later. 

“Come on,” Jane says, and puts a hand on your elbow. You let her nudge you to standing and then follow her out the back door. 

“Shit,” you say at the first sight of the landscape. The pot of flowers you’ve been determinedly (and mediocrely) trying to cultivate looks both bedraggled and overly-watered. One of the big nearby trees is what grabs your attention, though. It must’ve been hit by lightning, because it’s blackened and cleaved in two, with most of the trunk and the branches broken off and thrown onto the ground. If the Empress was the one who caused that, then you feel decidedly outclassed. 

“Dirk?” Jane says quietly. 

You make yourself turn to look at her and keep your voice pitched to nonchalant. “Yeah?” 

Jane just stares you down. “Are you angry?” 

You sigh. “I mean, not really. It’s not his fault or anything. Just upset.” 

“Angry with yourself?” Jane presses. 

You frown at your flowers. “Did we not look hard enough?” 

Jane makes a tiny, helpless noise, and presses her fists against her legs. She has been shorter than you the entire time you’ve known her, more than half your life, but you’ve never doubted her fierce strength of will. “No,” she says. “We searched with everything we had. I spent months searching, long after you stopped, you know. Roxy and I both. But there’s nothing we had that would’ve found him, if the Empress had him behind locking charms."

You know they had kept searching. You know Roxy has until this day kept an eye out and an ear to the ground for a hint of Jake’s whereabouts. But guilt squirms into your stomach like a parasitic bug. Jake’s been rotting in an underwater prison for five years and you stopped looking for him after, what, a month? No more than two months. And now you can’t bear to look at him. 

“I hope Roxy’ll be here soon,” you mutter. 

“I think she will,” Jane says. “She’ll call it a family emergency and no doubt will run herself dry speeding up her flight. It’s about 3,000 miles, isn’t it? I bet she’ll be here this evening.” 

“Yeah,” you say, and give in to the impulse to scrub your hands over your face. “Shit. What are we going to do all day?” 

“I’ll get Jake to write down some more details so when Roxy gets here we won’t have to retell the story,” Jane says. “You’ll help me cook and probably invent some reasons to be busy. I’ll catch up with my friend and do my very best to not be unreasonably angry with him.” 

This is an acceptable itinerary. Jane pulls you down and into a hug that goes a long way to soothing the ache in your chest. 

“Thanks for coming,” you say. 

Jane pulls back and rolls her eyes at you. “Of course I came!” she says. “Don’t be silly, Dirk.” 

“I’ll do my best to restrain any silliness,” you promise, and she whacks your shoulder before she goes back inside. 

If you take a minute to steel yourself before going back in, well, nobody’s there to see it.

 

* * *

 

The day goes as Jane predicted. Jake borrows your shower and some clean clothes while you dig through your belongings until you unearth an old spare pair of his glasses. You finish your sewing project from the night before and eavesdrop while Jake talks about allies he thinks the Empress has. Then you compulsively clean every surface in the kitchen when Jake gets choked up trying to talk about some of the things the Empress did to the prisoners in her keeping. Jane lets you preside over the kitchen for lunch while she helps Jake synthesize his experiences into the important, usable details. It helps settle you, a little bit, having something to do rather than sitting in your confused mix of feelings, guilt all tangled up with relief and shock and all your old feelings about Jake’s disappearance. Jane seems to figure out how to let go of that old anger, completely reasonably seeing as Jake had spent these past five years being tortured. You eat your soup and read over the notes they’ve created so far, trying to get the picture into your head. 

“And we’re certain she’ll come after you again?” you ask when you’re done reading. Jane is doing the washing-up this time. You risk a glance at Jake.

Jake scoffs, bitter. “She told us often what she’d do if we tried to escape. With her secrets on the line there’s no chance she’d just let me slip through her pointy claws. She’ll be furious that I broke out, much less found a way to keep her at bay a while with the sigils.” He glances at the back door and then runs a finger over the table, tracing the lines of something you can’t parse. “I didn’t mean to bring this down on your head.” 

You watch his hand and think about your answer. “Nobody deserves that. I’m glad you escaped,” you settle on. “We’ll figure out what to do.” 

Then it hurts too much to talk to him again and you excuse yourself outside. You check your firewood — still dry, for the most part — and walk over to the lightning-struck tree. The remaining trunk in the ground is blackened and burnt. You’re just lucky the lightning didn’t strike a tree closer to your house. The top half of the tree didn’t hit anything when it fell, so you just leave it where it is. The air outside is sharp but not too cold, just bracing. You shove your hands into your pockets and breathe in deep lungfuls, trying to keep your head.

Five years, and everything you thought about Jake during that time was wrong. Jake was enduring all sorts of torments at the hands of the same troll who’d killed your brother and Roxy’s mother years ago. The same troll who you’d suspected but never proved had been involved in Jake’s grandmother’s death. The one who everyone had been relieved to think dead for good. 

You make yourself keep breathing, slowly and evenly, until you feel settled enough to go back inside. 

The rest of the afternoon passes in a strange blur of waffling between wanting to never let Jake out of your sight again and being completely unable to look at him without feeling a gut-wrenching stab of pain. Jake doesn’t seem to know quite how to act around you, either, probably because of your swift retreat last night and your discomfort today. You hope Roxy arrives soon, if only to have another person to draw Jake’s attention. You try to help Jake draw an approximation of the layout of the Empress’s prison and make yourself feel so sick from proximity that you can barely eat at dinner. Jane shoots you concerned looks between bites, which you ignore. Jake has stopped staring at you, but now he just looks exhausted and careworn and curled up. When a loud clatter comes from out front and Roxy’s voice calls out to you, it’s a relief. Windswept, clad in heavy boots more suited to the ice and snow she just came from, carefully inscribed wind-protective face mask hanging around her neck, she throws open the door without waiting to be let in. Jake stands up from the table and Roxy runs across the room to fling her arms around him. 

“I knew we’d find you, I  _ knew _ you’d come back,” she says, squeezing him tight enough that it must hurt. “It’s so fucking good to see you, Jakey, gods.” 

Jake presses his face into her hair. “It’s good to see you, too,” he says, and then he starts shaking and Roxy drags him to the couch and lets him lean against her side as he cries. 

Having Roxy there breaks the tension. It doesn’t take long for Jake to let her go and slump back on the couch. Roxy goes out front again to put her broom in the shed, saying she’d been in too much of a hurry to do more than throw it aside when she’d finally arrived. You still think she’s nuts to fly around on that old thing but she swears by it, so you try not to be too vocally judgemental. Then she strips down to her thermals and throws herself back down on the couch beside Jake, demanding to know everything. 

You settle on the hearth in front of the fireplace and Jane takes one of the chairs. For a few minutes it’s just like old times, back when the four of you spent so many evenings in each other’s company. Roxy reads through some of Jake and Jane’s notes and then puts them aside. 

“Jake, you are one brave motherfucker,” she says. Jake tries to deny it. “No, I’m serious. This took total guts to survive. Glad you’re back. Now please tell me how you designed a sigil strong enough to keep that witch at bay because TBH I wish someone had invented that twenty years ago.” 

Twenty years ago, when her mom and your brother died taking down the Empress. Unsuccessfully, apparently. 

“Well, I had help with everything about the escape,” Jake admits. “She’d leave me alone in my cell for weeks on end while she came up with new things to test on us. I could talk to the folks in cells around me, and we’d brainstorm together. I practically know their life stories, too, at this point. And they probably know more about the three of you than they ever cared to know.” He laughs a little, tiredly. “They’re still there. That's why we need to stop her. I couldn't live with myself if I just abandoned them to that horror.” 

“When  we go back we'll be sure to save your friends,” Jane says firmly. 

“Thanks,” Jake says. “It’s really good to see you all again. Unimaginably good. Gods, I’m just grateful to be breathing air and feel warm again. And food! I’ve eaten so much raw fish. It’s incomprehensible.” 

“How far did you have to swim to get back to shore?” Roxy asks, a wrinkle in her forehead. 

“Not as far as you’d think, but still really fucking far.” Jake laughs and drops his head back. “Too friggin’ far. I thought my legs would just up and fall off before I hit the shore. But here I am.” 

“You must be tired,” Jane says. 

“Some,” Jake admits. “I won’t complain, though. It was most certainly worth it.” 

“Well I’m fucking beat,” Roxy says. “I flew so fast, thought my face would peel off if I went faster. All to see you, J. Hope you’re grateful if I wake up in the morning to find that my lips fell off in the night.” 

“That seems unlikely,” Jane objects, but she’s smiling, too. 

Roxy nudges you with a socked toe. Her heavy boots from earlier are buried in a pile of her outer clothes in the corner, a mix of her flight gear and cold weather gear, leaving her in just long johns and a wool shirt. “What’s a girl gotta do around here to get some late-night hospitality?” 

“Make extremely unsubtle statements,” you say, but haul yourself up from where the fire was burning pleasantly against your back. “Come help me get the extra mattress.” 

Roxy follows you into your bedroom and the two of you pull the second mattress you keep for her and Jane’s visits out from under the bed and install it in front of the fire with only some tricky maneuvering. 

“Jake, you sleep here with me, okay?” Roxy says. “I want to get the real scoop once these squares go to bed.” She offers an unnecessary wink. 

“I’ll take the sofa,” Jane volunteers, right as you start to offer for her to have your bed, and you the sofa. Jane wins this argument. You help her take the back cushions off and make sure everyone is going to have enough blankets, though it’s still a little early. You can feel Jane’s wakefulness charm starting to wear off, leaving you fuzzy-eyed and with a headache throbbing menacingly at the front of your skull. Unwilling to be left out of the impromptu slumber party, you pull the blankets and pillows off your bed and make yourself comfortable on the floor. Jane disappears to the bathroom and you rub your temples. 

“I’m taking a sleeping charm,” you warn Roxy and Jake. “So I’m going to be dead to the world pretty quick.”

“Ooh, good, we can throw a really raucous party, then,” Roxy says, wiggling her eyebrows. You throw the extra pillow the short distance to her face and Jake laughs, sitting on the far side of the mattress from you. You drop your gaze back to the charm wafer you’re holding. 

“So, yeah. Goodnight.” You pop it in your mouth and lay down, waiting for it to take effect. 

“Goodnight,” Jake echoes. 

“Nighty-night,” Roxy says, turning back to Jake. Their faces are the last thing in your mind as the charm carries you to sleep. 


	2. flame

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let's see how many times i increase the number of projected chapters for this fic before i finish it. oops.
> 
> gonna do like, alternating pov thing. so next one will be dirk again. :)

When Jane’s breathing is deep and even on the couch behind you, your whisperings with Roxy take a turn from tales of her science adventures to the sleeping man whose shape you can blurrily make out on the floor behind her. 

“You have good timing,” she tells you in a murmur. “Jane’s been encouraging him to think about dating again.” 

You bite the inside of your cheek hard, but some of your outrage must still show on your face because Roxy clicks her tongue. 

“You were gone a long time,” she says. 

“Not by choice,” you protest softly. “He didn’t. Did he?” 

She shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s not the sort of thing we talk about.” She frowns at you. “So you still…” 

“Of course I do,” you say. The fire crackles into the space before your next words. “But let’s not worry ourselves with that. How about you, Roxy? Are you seeing anyone?” 

Roxy shakes her head dismissively. “No, not currently.”

“So you and Jane didn’t…” 

She huffs out a near-silent laugh. “No. God, no. We did try, some time after you… had disappeared, but it didn’t work. I did date her cousin for a few months.” 

“John?” 

“Yeah, John. No dice there, either, but he was sweet. I guess sometimes things just don’t work out how we want them to.” 

Roxy’s words are light, and gently delivered. You wish she’d been harsher so you’d have grounds to snap back, insist that you won’t give up on Dirk. You just tuck a hand under your pillow and blink against the flickering firelight. “It’s strange to be back.” 

She nods. “I can only imagine. I know I keep saying it, but it’s real good to see you. We all missed you something crazy.” 

“Not as much as I missed you,” you say wistfully. The fire casts jumping shadows over everything. Nothing at all like light through water, and so warm. You suck in the smell of burning wood and marvel at how easy it is to breathe. 

Roxy studies your face. “You seem… not okay, but not too upset. How are you feeling?” 

“Oh,” you say, the warmth of the fire and blankets getting to you all of a sudden. You feel like you could sink into this soft bliss and never come out. “It hardly feels real at all. Like a long dream.” 

Roxy reaches across the mattress suddenly to grip your free wrist in a startling strong hold. Her expression is keenly vehement. 

“It’s real,” she says. “We’re real. And we’ll do whatever it takes — to keep safe, or to rescue your friends, or to overthrow the sea witch, anything. I’m not letting you get snagged away from us again, you hear me? You’re safe here.” 

You worm your hand free enough to link your fingers together with hers. “Well,” you say, blinking back another sudden wash of tears. “Much obliged.”

 

* * *

You wake up first of all your friends. Perhaps it’s the creeping sunlight across the floor that wakes you, or merely the presence of your friends around you, but you’re the first to disentangle yourself from the mess of blankets and creep quietly around the house that used to be your home. You feel the previousness of your claim to this house all the more strongly when you have to cross through the bedroom to reach the bath. There’s a few scatterings of Dirk’s belongings about. It casts an odd incongruity with your memories of this house, particularly as you had already doubted the accuracy of your memories after so much time. 

The fact that there is no hint that you ever lived here stings more than you can admit and by far more than is fair to Dirk. By the blue fucking bejesus if you hadn’t gone over and over in your head what Dirk must’ve thought when you’d just — never come home. It’d half been a worse torment than anything the witch could’ve put you through, knowing what your disappearance must have done to Dirk. You’re a decent enough man to admit that any sullenness you might feel at his easily-spooked recalcitrance is almost laughably unfair. But you’re not decent enough to resist falling prey to anger at Roxy’s suggestion that Dirk might have moved on. 

There’s no hints around that Dirk’s taken up with anyone, just normal bathroom amenities. You do find some very nice hand lotion. It smells like roses. With tremendous force of will you refrain from really snooping through the bathroom and take a shower. The rising morning sun offers bright cheer through the skylight as you scowl at your empress-be-gone sigil, scratched in by Dirk’s little ritual knife. This bathroom, this floor whose foundation you helped lay, this skylight that you’d designed. Your shower is very brief and you redress in yesterday’s fresh enough borrowed clothes. They smell like Dirk, which seems just made to be cruel. 

Everyone’s still asleep when you return. You find the remaining eggs in the cooling box and start on breakfast. You wonder if Dirk still gets his eggs from the older woman up the hill a ways, the one he’d charmed into letting the two of you have some of her eggs in exchange for lending a hand with her projects. 

There comes a rustling from the living room as you’re setting yourself to the task of briskly whisking the eggs. Dirk’s head pops up a moment later, bleary-eyed, hair mussed. After a moment he finds you across the room with razor-sharp attention. 

You don’t want to wake everyone else, so you raise the whisk in acknowledgement before turning back to the stove. One of the inscribed metal circles flares into flame with a quick flick and you set the pan over it. 

It is very difficult not to watch Dirk unwrap himself from his blankets and get up. You keep him in your peripherals as he yawns and stretches himself awake. It takes a few minutes but Dirk eventually joins you in the kitchen. He gets a glass out of a cabinet and flips the faucet from off to on. 

“Good morning,” you venture. 

“Hey,” Dirk mutters. The years have not made him any more easily read, to your quiet dismay. He drinks his glass of water and then braces himself against the counter with a sigh. His hair hangs in his face and he grimaces as he brushes it back. You consider a few possible things you could say to break the hanging silence, but the uncertainty swallows you up. 

“Gonna shower,” Dirk decides. “If the girls wake up just go ahead and eat without me.” 

“We’ll — I’ll save some for you,” you say. Dirk acknowledges this offer with a jerk of his head and then disappears back toward the bedroom. You nudge the eggs around in their pan and try not to feel a fool for thinking that just because you’d clung to your memories of Dirk would mean he had done the same. 

Jane wakes next, and wakes Roxy when she sees that you started breakfast. The two of them find some fruit and the three of you eat. It’s the easiest thing in the world, to sink gratefully back into their company. Every sly comment from Roxy and quiet flash of humor from Jane feels as though it sparks up your old memories of them, returning them from faded sketches on a page to full, vibrant people. Jane’s irritation from yesterday morning seems forgotten by her, but even that only served to remind you of all the little details of your friends that had slipped through the grasp of your memory. 

Dirk returns with his hair tinted darker by water and accepts the plate you’d set aside for him. As he takes a seat Roxy pushes back from the table to retrieve the notes Jane had scribed for you. 

“Wait,” Jane says. “Before you start, I think one of us should run up the road to town to stock up on provisions. Dirk’s pantry is not going to sustain the four of us for however long it’s going to take to form a decent plan.” 

“Yeah, sorry,” Dirk says. “I was planning on a grocery run anyway. I can go, if that’s easiest.” 

“You really trust us alone in your house while you’re gone?” Roxy teases. 

Dirk rolls his eyes. “I trust you to keep our prankstress in check, if that’s the compliment you’re fishing for.” 

“How rude,” Jane says. “I’ll have you know that I rushed to your side in such a hurry that I left all my best supplies at home.” 

“I’m certain that you don’t need anything to devise mischief other than what’s readily at hand,” you say. 

“Ever the flatterer.” Jane shakes her head, but she’s doing a poor job at concealing her smile. “I thought I might go, Dirk, since we’re not sure if there’s a risk of one of the Empress’s allies knowing this is your house and keeping a lookout for you.” 

Dirk concedes this point. Jane bundles up against the cool winter winds and waves herself off, promising to be back in a jiffy! Which leaves you with one less buffer against Dirk’s best effort at not looking at you. “I can wash up,” you offer, really just to delay needing to act at least mostly unbothered by Dirk’s obvious unease. 

“No,” Dirk says unexpectedly. “I’ll do it since you all made breakfast.” 

“And I have some questions for you, Jakey,” Roxy says, and draws you over to the sofa. “The cells where she kept her prisoners, can you explain them better?” 

“Um, I can undertake another venture at verbal illustrations if needed, yes,” you say. “What exactly are you wondering?” 

She points to the sketches Dirk made. “This shows they’re built up against a wall, but then…” She pulls out a different paper. “Here Jane says you were in cages.” 

“Oh, yes,” you say. “We were kept in cages, but the cages themselves were built into a sort of... canyon? It was a very narrow section of the canyon, perhaps a branch off the main one. The cage doors were on top, and we all had one wall that was the canyon, but the rest was some sort of metal. I don’t know what type.” 

Roxy frowns and taps her fingers on the drawing. “And… she did something so you could breathe? Probably dealt with the water pressure, too. How much light did you have?” 

“There was… some light. Even at midday it was not too bright. And it was cold.” You think of the dark maw of the canyon below you and shudder involuntarily. “Hell, I suppose it wasn’t really all that cold. We were a few smidges over freezing, enough to make your teeth chatter. She could keep us alive and well from that, too, with her witchy hijinks. Or we’d all have passed on from hypothermia.” It was her best trick, too, at keeping everyone in line. Take away the protection from the cold and watch you start to shiver until you pleaded for her to let you have it back. There’s a worried pinch in Roxy’s brow. You realize that you’ve wrapped your arms around yourself as if you were out in the weather rather than sequestered in front of the fire and force yourself to relax. 

“Does that answer your question?” you ask, trying to force a little brightness into your tone. 

Roxy hesitates. “How are the cages locked? Magic, or a key?” 

“Magic,” you say. “The metal stays welded together except to her touch.” 

“How’d you get out?” Roxy looks like she’s not sure whether it’s a good idea to ask or not. 

You smile grimly. “More magic. It was difficult but not impossible to recreate what she did to unweld the metal.” 

“Difficult but not impossible,” Dirk repeats, startling you. He must’ve finished with the dishes because he’s standing some feet away, listening intently. 

“Yes,” you say, swallowing hard at the sight of unfamiliar emotion on Dirk’s face. “It did take me five years, didn’t it, and I wasn’t the first to try.” 

Dirk nods and says nothing else, but he’s looking at you, actually looking at you. You want to say something, if only to ease the sorrow you think he’s wearing, but he breaks eye contact, staring at the fire instead. “I should — I’m going to get more firewood,” he says, and hightails it out the back door. 

You’re on your feet without consciously deciding to stand. “I, um, I should see if he needs help with, with that,” you tell Roxy, and run out after him. 

You find Dirk indeed by the woodpile, bending to get wood to bring in. He startles when he sees you, a nearly-hidden flinch. You might once have had the honor of saying you were the one who knew him best out of the entire population of the world. He reminds you now more of the boy you met many years ago, before you were even teenagers, so quiet and careful and self-contained. And he’s not like the child he was at all, either, because that boy had brittle sharp edges and the man before you seems tumbled and worn down to nothing. You can’t stand it. Dirk straightens warily, smudges under his eyes too dark to be cured by one night’s sleep, drying hair now neatly pulled back in a fashion that had startled you at first glance with its divergence from your memory. He’s so dear to you. To not touch him seems unbearable, unfair though it may be. 

“Uh, hey,” he says. “Are you—”

“I’m not sorry about this,” you say, and crowd him back up against the woodpile so he can’t bolt when you lean in to kiss him. Dirk goes stiff and still under your grip, both hands on his shoulders, but you can’t bring yourself to care. You kiss him desperately, trying to convey all the longing and sorrow you’ve felt, how much you missed him. Dirk slowly warms to your touch, not kissing back as much as you’d want but not leaving you to kiss a statue, either. His mouth is so warm. It’s more than you remembered, and so much less than everything you want from him. You break the kiss and press your foreheads together, biting your lip. Dirk’s hand comes up to your wrist, but he doesn’t push you away, just closes his fingers around it. 

“I missed you,” you say. “Every day, I missed you. I would never have left like that. I…” You have to clear your throat around the growing lump. “I never stopped thinking of you. Just so we’re clear. I know things have probably… changed, for you, but I wanted you to know.” You force yourself to step back. “Can I help you bring the wood in?” 

Dirk doesn’t let go of your wrist, though, preventing you from backing up too far. “I…” he says. “We were…” His expression is clouded with something, his gaze directed left of you. 

You let him gather his thoughts, hoping he won’t let go after all. 

“We… fought,” Dirk says at last. “And you never came back. I assumed that was why. That you’d. That the fight was the last straw I hadn’t realized you were on.” 

You know. You hated to think of it, what your disappearance must’ve done to him, unable to bear the thought of him suffering. 

“We knew you weren’t dead, is the thing,” Dirk adds. “Because when I checked the foundation of the house your half of the sigils were still holding strong. I figured maybe, since it was me who said we should live together, that maybe we could think about a marriage bond, you felt guilty about leaving. If I’d been so pushy.” He lets you go abruptly and crosses his arms, tucking his hands in around his sides. There’s a cold, stinging breeze in the air, but his posture reads more defensive than chilled. 

“You weren’t.” You have to clear your throat before you can keep talking. “You weren’t pushy. It’d be a downright lie to say I didn’t want all those things as much as you did.”

Five years lost hang between you. You don’t know how to bridge them. 

“I thought of you every day,” you say at last.  

Dirk nods. “It’s just a shock,” he says. “I… missed you too. I just need to sort this all through. Make sense of it in my head. Is that okay?” 

“Of course it’s okay,” you say. It’s far more of a chance at Dirk still being inclined towards a future with you than you’d had yet. “Take as much time as you need.” 

Dirk nods again, looking faintly relieved. Now that you have this answer you feel your old familiar nerves coming back to squeeze you tight. You look down at your feet, tongue-tied. Dirk rescues you with his next words. 

“I really do need to bring more logs in,” he says, and turns back to the firewood, face now hidden from you. “Especially if there might be more storms. Normal ones or sea witch vengeance ones, they all sort of amount to the same fucking thing. Soaks fires, knocks trees over, scares dogs and small children. I mean. Just helps to be prepared.” 

“Indubitably it’s always best to prepare for poor outcomes,” you say. “Here, let me help.” You entreat him to hand over his current armful and try not to savor the brush of his arm against yours. The two of you start back to the house and you wrangle the door open one-handed for the both of you. In your absence Roxy has sprawled out over the entire couch, long legs hooked over an armrest and one arm flopped down to the floor. 

“Dirk,” she whines. “I’m tired. I can’t think at all… My brain’s going to drip out my ears…” 

“I don’t have any coffee,” Dirk says, stacking the wood you two brought in next to the fireplace. 

Roxy groans. “We should’ve told Janey to buy some. Should I send her a message? That’s not annoying, right.” 

“I have some of that really strong fermented tea you brought back from one of your trips,” Dirk offers. “Or you could work on cutting back on your caffeine intake.” 

“You’re so cruel,” Roxy says with a theatrical sigh. She winks at you behind his back. “No, you be a good boy and brew me some of that good stuff, okay?” 

Dirk retreats to the kitchen with an eye roll to fill up the kettle. Roxy snags your sleeve and drags you closer. 

“Good talk?” she asks in an undertone. 

You nod. 

She pats your arm. “Good.” She tucks her feet in close to her body so you can sit again, and immediately drops her legs over your lap. “I bet you’ve never had this kind of tea,” she continues in a normal tone. “It’s good stuff, J, worth drooling over. And I say that as a self-respecting lady of good morals and character.” 

“I’m sure I believe you,” you say. “Though all the same I’ll try it first before I offer judgement.” 

Roxy laughs. “I think I might have the start of a plan, too. Thought it up while you were out ‘getting firewood.’” You ignore her air-quotes and raised eyebrows. “We go to all your pals and set ‘em free, ask anyone who’s willing to help us out. One of us stick with them and go after Her Royal Highness in a big swarm, then while she’s gloating at overpowering that group with her flashy magicks so easily the rest of us sneak up and go for a classic stab with a big fucking knife.” She raises her voice. “You still know how to stab people, right, Dirk?” 

“I still practice, yes,” Dirk says from the kitchen. He’s fiddling with some cloth bag which must contain the tea. 

“There you go, then,” Roxy says. “Next step: I turn this plan over to Jane and his truly and they poke it full of holes and make us come up with contingencies.” 

“Sounds respectable to me,” you say. The kettle starts whistling and Dirk shuts it off. You can’t quite see what he’s doing, but he finally comes back with three mugs of tea. It’s an unusual flavor, the fermentation, but not necessarily bad. 

“You know you brew it wrong,” Roxy says, though she looks blissful as she inhales the steam. 

“Dipping a tea infuser into the mug works just as well, and is a lot less hassle,” Dirk retorts. He sets his mug aside. “So your plan is sneak up and stab her?” 

Roxy sticks her tongue out at him. “No, my plan is free all her prisoners first, so that even if we don’t succeed in stopping her, some of them escape and warn more people that she’s still alive.” 

Dirk acknowledges this. You take another sip of your tea to hide the way the thought of dying deep below the surface sends a familiar panicked tremor through you. 

“We should take a gander at a map of the shoreline,” you say. “It would help if we could make a more certain approximation of the location of her lair, wouldn’t it?” 

“I’ll dig up a map,” Dirk says. “I’m pretty sure I have a local map that has some of the… I forget the name. The part of the ocean right offshore.” 

“Coastal ocean. Neritic zone,” Roxy says. 

“Thanks, also, what the fuck, marine science isn’t anything close to your specialties,” Dirk says, though he goes to stand anyway. 

“I’m full of knowledge.” Roxy bats her eyelashes at you as Dirk makes his way out of the room. 

It takes him a minute, but Dirk unearths a map with enough ocean on it for the three of you to pour over. You spend some time trying to guess the location where the canyon the Empress kept you with minor success, somewhat hampered by your best estimate of how far offshore you’d been kept being “a right fair distance.” Nobody is certain of the whereabouts of the canyon you’ve described, and Roxy and Dirk are discussing who they could ask who might know when Jane returns. 

She has the groceries, but it hardly takes a second glance for you to know something’s wrong. She dumps her bags on the table and says, “There was a pirate attack last night.” 

Your stomach executes a perfect flip-turn and makes a bid for freedom. You’re on your feet before you finishing registering her words. “Pirates! Which — did they say which — ”

Jane nods grimly. “Mindfang, who else? You said she’s been secretly in league with the Empress all along, didn’t you?” 

“Yes,” you say, and sink back onto the couch. “How much damage did she wreak?” 

Jane blows out a breath and sags against the table. “It’s not terrible. For the most part she tried to burn the mayor’s house and frightened people by dashing about, sword drawn. Not nearly as much as she might have done.” 

“It must be a message,” Dirk says. “That the Empress knows we’re here, but isn’t… taking direct action.” 

“Or she’s toying with us.” You tuck your feet up onto the couch numbly. “The town doesn’t deserve this.” 

“Don’t start blaming yourself,” Roxy says sharply. “It’s not your fault she’s cruel.” 

“Half the town remembers you. They’d be horrified to know what she has been doing to her prisoners.” Dirk’s wearing his thinking face: eyes distant, brows slightly furrowed. “We should let some people know you’re back.”  

“Not that I wouldn’t like to reconnect with a few folks,” you say, “but should it be a priority?” 

“They might want to know why they’ve just weathered a pirate attack,” Dirk says. “But I was thinking more along the lines of Roxy’s plan. If we explain what happened to you, and then you disappear again…” 

“They’d suspect foul play, yeah,” Roxy agrees. Dirk gets up and goes to sort through what Jane bought and Jane steals his seat. Roxy nudges you. “You okay?” 

“I feel bad,” you admit. “Seems like… my fault, at least a tad?” 

“You couldn’t have anticipated such quick retaliation,” Jane says. “We’ll just have to add pirates into our list of potential interfering parties.” She sighs. “Looks like the three of you got some work done, at least.” 

“Chipping away at it,” Roxy says. “Is it too risky for one of us to go down to the beach? Might be able to get a more exact location on that canyon if I could go.” 

“I thought Dirk was going to ask someone in town,” you say. 

Roxy shrugs. “Whatever’s fastest. I don’t want to wait too long before we go after her. What if she relocates?” 

You imagine diving back beneath the water, down and down toward the rim of the canyon only to find the cages empty, doors open and being buffeted by the currents. “That would be a right fucking bummer.”

From the kitchen Dirk says, “We should start working on waterbreathing charms. There’s no point in knowing where she is but not being able to get to her. Might be worth trying to make ease of movement charms, to help with all the swimming we’ll have to do.”

“And we’ll have to make something for the diving, too,” Roxy says, picking up one of the scattered papers you’re amassing. “There’s a lot of pressure in the deep.” 

“Tomorrow,” Jane suggests. “I want to hear more about this plan of Roxy’s first. Do you have some things we can use for charms?” 

You see Dirk nod because you’re watching him put the food away. “A whole box full. I’ll dig them out in the morning.” 

The chilling thought that you might be pressed for time hovers over you and your friends as you discuss various attacking strategies and listen to Roxy complain about weapon ineffectiveness underwater. The only thing your apprehension of confronting the Empress can’t reach is the bright talisman of finally getting to kiss Dirk again, and how he didn’t push you away. You keep it tucked away warm in your heart, safe next to how Dirk can now meet your gaze without flinching away. 


	3. wind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> housekeeping: i went back and edited the word "glyph" to be "sigil" because "sigil" is like, more technically accurate and it was bugging me

Once Jane surmises the plan that’s been cultivated so far boils down to ‘free everyone’ and then ‘try to get your sneak on’, she makes no secret of how idiotic she thinks this idea is. Roxy takes offense at her plan being called _best suited for those wishing to die immediately and ingloriously_. She tells Jane to come up with a better plan. Jane says that you all need more time to consider the situation. Roxy reminds her that Jake’s friends are languishing in a sea-prison, and Jake himself stands there watching this confrontation looking something in the vicinity of alarmed. Your home is too small to comfortably contain an argument, and the result is an uncomfortable pall being cast over the house. The tense air hangs, making Jane snap when you ask what everyone wants for lunch, making Roxy push away the makeshift maps in disgust, and making Jake very quiet. When Roxy makes a comment leaning heavily towards snide you ask Jake for help with something and pull him away with you, up the retractable stairs and into the attic.

Up here is filled with crates and boxes and low-ceilinged enough that you have to stay under the highest part of the roof to avoid hitting your head. Jake glances around curiously. “What are we up here for, then?”

You look at him sidelong. Though it’s no longer so painful to share space with him, you still feel nervous. “Figured we could let the girls snap at each other in peace. And that you might be sick of wearing my clothes.” They’re not terribly ill-fitting on him, but they don’t look the most comfortable, either.

Jake looks confused. “I’m… grateful for the loan, of course.”

You gesture at the boxes awkwardly. “I forget which ones are clothes. But I have all your stuff.”

Understanding dawns on his face and he looks around with different eyes. “I’d have thought you’d have tossed it all out to the junkyard, or at least some. Goodness knows I was a terrible packrat.”

You shrug. “It never felt right, knowing you were still out there somewhere but doing away with your things.” Deciding what to do with Jake’s belongings was painfully tricky. You had memorabilia from school, his few remaining heirlooms from his grandmother, even a few journals he’d kept over the years. You’d packed most of his books away, though you’d kept downstairs the ones that hadn’t really belonged to either of you more than the other.

The two of you start opening boxes to find Jake’s old clothes. The first few boxes you open are your own unneeded items, stored away. Old papers, letters from your friends over the years, spare linens, summer clothes, some of your brother’s belongings that had survived the troubled, disorderly years after his death and before you settled into the school you’d grown up at. Jake makes a noise of discovery behind you, and you turn.

“Find something?” you prompt.

“Yeah, all my annual school evaluations that they bind into a book for you on graduation,” he says. “Listen to this.” He clears his throat. “Year five. _Jake is a clever student who would benefit from being taught to apply his keen imagination to subjects beyond musings on the possible existence of life in the cosmos._ ”

“I remember that,” you say. “That was the year you drew aliens on all your papers.”

“It was also the year we had an instructor in astronomy, and I baffled everyone by hating the class. All my teachers hated me, I think. You remember I was a terrible trial to teach.” Jake flips through a few pages. “You’re mentioned here in Year Seven.”

“Am I?” You move to his side to see the book. Jake indicates a section and you read it aloud. “ _Woe betide the teacher who instructs both Jake English and Dirk Strider at once. While they work well together for paired projects, they are equally likely to begin whispering to each other during instruction and pay not a lick of attention to the class.”_ You raise an eyebrow at the page. “Did you edit my name?” The original word was blacked out thoroughly and has _Dirk_ written over in white ink.

“Must have, though I don’t recall doing it.” Jake licks his finger and turns a few pages. “Ah, this is what I was looking for.” One of the sections for Year Eight has been scribbled over in what you recognize to be your younger self’s handiwork. There’s an unflattering drawing of a man you think was one of the teachers and a caption reading _sanctimonious dickhead._

“What potty mouthed kid wrote that?” you quip. “Must’ve been a bad influence on you.”

Jake flashes you a sideways grin. “He was some charming rascal, I’m sure, though one with a crude sense of humor.” He runs a finger down the opposite page. “Didn’t mean to get us distracted from the task at hand.”

“S’okay,” you say. “No harm in reminiscing.”

Jake flips to the last page, with his certificate of graduation, and sighs. Jane alone out of the four of you has a signature from a family member on hers. “What do you think, Strider? About going after the Empress. Do you think we have a chance against her?”

You hesitate, considering. “The idea of going the same way as my brother is really not very fucking appealing. That’s an outcome I’d all around like to avoid.”

“And neither am I inclined to join my grandmother in an early grave due to judicious application of a culling fork,” Jake agrees. “I think we can agree that both they and Roxy’s mother had more badassery skills than we can ever hope to compete with.”

“Speak for yourself,” you say. “I like to think I’m pretty good with a sword. But no, you’re right. It doesn’t inspire confidence to learn that the people I thought were able to take her down actually failed. I think we have a chance though. If we’re lucky, it might even be a decent chance.” You look up from the book Jake’s still holding and become belatedly aware of how close you’re standing. You elect to ignore this. “I bet I could find my record book, too, if you want to continue this jaunt down memory lane.”

“Yes please,” Jake says, shutting his book. “If we happen across it, I’d be delighted to revisit what our teachers thought of you.”

You find the boxes of Jake’s clothes nearly simultaneously with him locating your old school things. He sets the book on the ground and you both settle with your backs against some of the boxes.

“It’s got something in it,” Jake says, poking at some papers sticking out from the bottom of the book.

“Well, open it, and there won’t be a mystery,” you suggest.

“Your sense of adventure has not improved, I see,” Jake says, and flips open the cover. There are two items loose at the front of the book. The envelope you recognize immediately and snatch up, embarrassed. The other paper is face down.

“I’m going to stick this with my other old letters,” you say, trying for casual, and pitch it overhand into one of the open boxes.

“What, no!” Jake cranes his neck after it. “What was in that?”

“Just letters,” you say. “That’s what usually goes in envelopes, you know.”

“I know,” he says, shooting you a wide-eyed pleading look so falsely innocent that you want to laugh. “Were they special ones?”

You cave, a little. “They were special to me. Are we looking at this thing or not?”

Jake sighs and turns back to the book. He flips over the other loose paper and considers the sketch on it in silence.

“I think you made my nose too small,” he says at last.

You hope you’re not as red in the face as you feel. “My drawing technique has improved since I was seventeen. Can I see that?”

“So you can hide it, too? Don’t think so.” Jake tucks the sketch against the first page of the book again and turns the page. “Let’s see. Starts in Year Four. When we were… eight? Or nine, I can never recall.”

“Eight,” you say.

Jake nods. “I was quite lonely before you and Roxy joined the ranks of orphaned schoolchildren whose only home was the school’s dormitories, you know. And Jane didn’t attend ‘til Year Six.” He lifts the book to read it. “This says you were very quiet, troublingly so. Well, that’s never been my experience of you.” Jake turns a few more pages. “Here’s our first mention of Roxy. Apparently you were her enabler for mischief.”

“That sounds like me,” you say.

“Mmhm, a bit,” Jake agrees. “Here’s a good one. _Young Mister Strider has become fast friends with Jake English, and has declared that the two shall be as brothers in arms. I encourage my colleagues to use this new friendship as a basis for instruction in cooperative magic._ ”

“It doesn’t say mister,” you say.  

“Please allow me my poetic license, Dirk, honestly. But it does say brothers in arms.” Jake points to the page.

You frown at the words in mild surprise. “Huh. Funny.”

“I bet you did a lot of stuff like that and we just don’t remember it.” Jake flips through the book. “Looks like you didn’t deface this one. It’s just a load of boring school talk. Let’s see what they said when you graduated!”

“Sure,” you say, mostly watching Jake become animated in a way you haven’t seen in a very long time. “Did they see potential in my future?”

“Oh, they undoubtedly must have.” He squints at the page. “This teacher thought you should have gone with Roxy to the desert for her internship on how magic starts to break down at extreme temperatures. Aaaand… this one suggested you help Jane with the bake shop she didn’t end up starting. This — hey! This one said not to risk your future for a teenage romance.” Jake looks deeply offended. “As if I was some casual dalliance, the nerve.”

Despite yourself and despite the fact that you told Jake just this morning that you need to sort the whole fucking mess of his reappearance in your head, you wonder if he might try to kiss you again, while you’re alone and secluded up here. You’re suddenly swept up in the desire to tell Jake to forget the fucking Empress, forget about trying to stop her and just stay here, safe. If you could just have more time like this, to remember your history together and how to be near him without it hurting, then maybe you could fix things between you without this whole inherited pile of shit in the way. But the knowledge that there’s danger ahead, it chokes you silent.

Jake shuts the book. “Well, it’s in the past, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” you manage. “Nobody could’ve predicted the Empress’s interference, anyway.”

Jake sighs. Some of the good humor drains from him. “No. Certainly not.” He offers you the book. “Thanks for indulging me.”

Whatever odd moment of peace you’d shared in reminiscing is broken well and thoroughly. You tuck the book into the safety of a box with paper-preserving sigils inscribed on the side, moving yourself out of Jake’s bubble. “This one has some clothes,” you say, kicking a box forward.

Jake burns a portability sigil to make the box more lightweight into the wood and lifts it up easily. Between you both you get it down to your bedroom easily and Jake stashes it in a corner where it won’t be in the way. Being alone with him in your bedroom is way fucking worse than being alone with him in the attic somehow and you hustle out of there to go check on the girls before you’re tempted to start chatting about your mutual childhood again.

In the living room you find only Jane. She’s organizing the papers you’ve already managed to amass in the past few days into neater stacks.

“Where’s Roxy?” you ask.

“She’s out sending a letter to her fellow scientists,” Jane replies. She looks remarkably calm for how short tempered she’d been not half an hour ago. “Letting them know that her family emergency is going to keep her away for a while.”

“Okay,” you say. “Did you sort out a new plan?”

“We agreed that compromise was necessarily,” Jane says, with a satisfied air that tells you she won some of that battle. “But, either way, we’re taking an evening off.”

“We are?” Jake asks from behind you. He shuts the bedroom door.

“So we have time to mull things over,” Jane says. “Tomorrow — well, there are some thing that need doing. But let’s take a break from worrying about that tonight.”

“What things?”

Jane gives you an unimpressed stare. “Letting the town know what happened to Jake, asking about the canyon, seeing if someone has suggestions on boats we can use so we don’t have to swim so far, asking about Mindfang, creating charms we can wear, testing concealment sigils. Is that a lengthy enough to-do list, or shall I add more to the itinerary?”

You back off. “That’s fine.”

The rest of the evening is passed together in nostalgically easy company. Being the best cooks, you and Jane make dinner and you forgo the table in favor of eating by the fireplace. Roxy has a new dice game that she picked up on a research expedition that she teaches you. It’s not too hard to play so long as you don’t think too hard about the worry creased into Jake’s face whenever he’s not laughing along.

Jane is the first to yawn, and when you’re all leaning towards tired she insists on letting you have the couch for the night. You don’t fight her on it too much. It does mean that you’re facing Jake as you’re drifting off, though, and you’re not quite able to keep yourself from considering the form of his body under the blankets, not looking for anything in particular more than you’re just trying to absorb his presence. Eventually your eyes shut, and don’t reopen for some time.

It’s dark when you wake, the fire no more than banked ashes. You don’t know what woke you for a long moment, but there’s a restless edge to the air that won’t let you sleep again. Listening, there is the quiet breathing of your friends, and the wind whistling outside. You register that Jake is not on the mattress.

When you sit up, the darkness resolves into vague shapes: the table, the walls, the kitchen, the windows. There’s an incongruent shadow by one of the front windows and you kick the blankets off to pick your way over to him.

He barely acknowledges you, head tilted toward the window and one hand on the sill. No, one hand over the sigil he’d burned into it. He’s listening to the wind, you realize.

“It’s not a storm. I don’t think it’s magical,” you murmur.

Jake nods. “I know,” he whispers back. Still, he doesn’t move, and you find yourself straining to hear, searching for traces of something in the wind to indicate a presence, any note of a mind or hint of awareness in its tone. There’s still nothing, but you wait until Jake releases the windowsill with a sigh before you go back to bed.

 

* * *

 

In the morning you and Jake set off towards the town. It’s a bright winter day, crisp and sunny with a chilling hint of wind. Still, you’re on edge, scanning the sky, wishing you’d brought a weapon.

“Remind me who we’re dropping in on?” Jake asks. He’s also keeping a nervous eye out. It’s the first time you’ve left the house since he returned.

“Nepeta and Equius. They moved here a few years ago, so you wouldn’t know them,” you say.

“Trolls?” he asks.

You nod. “They build boats. Well, Equius does a lot of the building and repairs, but we’re really going to see Nepeta. She spends a lot of time out on the water, might know something about the canyon. She’s a big expert on ships.”

“Sounds promising,” Jake says, and lapses back into silence.

To your left lies the ocean, crashing onto the rocky cliffside. For most of your life looking down at the ocean has inspired a rare calmness in you. Today, the distant, pine-covered mountains to the right have a strong appeal, contrary to your usual hatred of high elevations. You wind your way higher, despite the anxious feeling, until you can see the town from the top of the slope.

“People won’t have any reason to disbelieve us, will they?” Jake asks. “I mean, it all sounds a tad farfetched, especially coming from someone they don’t know well.”

You frown. “They should believe you. And if they don’t, that’s why I’m here to back you up.”

He nods and casts another wary glance at your surroundings.

You voice something that’s been bugging you. “When you first came back, you said you thought _she’d_ be scouring the area until the sigils wore through. But she hasn’t been back, as far as we know. Just sent her lackey to scare the town. Why do you think that is?”

There’s a moment while Jake considers his answer. “I’ve been thinking about it, too,” he says slowly. “I think… maybe she anticipates we’re coming to her. No point in chasing us down if we’re just going to walk — well, swim back into her clutches. She’s good at biding her time.”

“Right. Makes sense,” you say, and walk a little faster down the hill.

You like this town. It’s one of the reasons you and Jake decided to build your house in this area. Jane lives only a few hours away, inland and in a larger city. Roxy lives there too, in a fantastic mess of an apartment that she only inhabits half the time anyway. The two of you had both wanted to be near the coastline. The town itself is a little small, maybe, but you’d liked the people you met in it, trolls and humans who reached out to you with friendliness despite never having met you before. It was very different from the school and nearby town you’d spent so much time in while you were growing up, where everyone knew the students and you’d never quite managed a real sense of home, changing dormitories every few years and knowing that you were different from the other students, the ones who got to go home at the end of the day to their families. Like Jane, though she’d tried to be polite about it.

You’d wanted space to share and fill up and call your own, and a town with new people. The ocean near your doorstep. And for a while, you’d had that.

The road dumps you at the base of town, near the wharf. A few of the boats docked in the water bear the kitty-cat insignia that Nepeta uses as their personal brand, the same insignia painted cheerfully on the door to the shop in front of you. You glance at Jake, swallow your nerves, and step inside.

The bell jingles when you push the door open, quiet to you but loud enough for sensitive troll ears to detect. Jake looks around curiously, taking in the small array of tools and hardware the occasional book on the best methods of magical seafaring available for purchase in the front of the shop. The wares are stacked neatly on shelves reaching all the way up to the high ceilings, built to accommodate troll heights. It’s not the first time you’ve been here, and accordingly you know that everything  interesting is in the back, where both repairs and building take place.

“This is a quaint little place, isn’t it?” Jake asks, examining a sigil kit for use on wood. You start to reply but cut yourself off when one of the shop’s co-proprietors appears in the doorway behind the counter.

“Oh, hello, Dirk,” Equius says.

“Hi,” you say. Jake straightens up. “Jake, this is Equius, who I was telling you about earlier. Equius, this is my — uh, my old friend, Jake.”

“Pleasure to meet you,” Jake says.

“Likewise,” Equius says. “Is there some manner in which I can be of assistance?”

“We were actually hoping to talk to Nepeta. Is she in?” you ask.

“Oh,” he says, looking vaguely disappointed. “She is not. My apologies for the inconvenience, but she is out of town at the moment.”

You bite down a curse. “Do you know when she’ll be back?” you ask.

“In a day or two, I believe. It was meant to be a short trip.” He hesitates. “Though of course I wouldn’t want to impose my will should it not be desired or welcome, are you absolutely certain I won’t be able to help you?”

“Well, you might be,” you say. “It’s, uh, bit of a long story. But do you know anything about the underwater landscape, just off the coast here? There’s…” You reach up and pull your ponytail tighter, a bad nervous habit you haven’t been able to kick yet. “There should be a submarine canyon just offshore.”

“A canyon,” Equius repeats. “Those are not uncommon, although I don’t believe I know of one specifically in this area. Terribly sorry not to have your answer.” He drags his sleeve across his forehead once. “You are correct in thinking Nepeta may have the answer. I insisted that she spend time studying the old maps and documents written by the old seadwelling nobility before their unfortunate demise — that is to say, I find it unfortunate. From different perspectives it may be seen differently. The Empress’s actions — the deceased Empress, as you know—”

“About that,” you say, before he can work himself up further. You shoot Jake a look.

“Yes, about that,” Jake says accordingly. “She’s, ah, she’s not dead! She’s on the up and up and is putting a lot of investments in the abduction business. It’s really quite a terrible matter, to be frank as frankincense. She wants to bring the seadweller trolls back and she’s taken to practicing some unsavory experiments on her abductees to try to make some waterbreathers. She’s not been successful to the extents of my knowledge. I mean, magic, sure, we know how to make ourselves able to breathe underwater. But she’s trying to alter biology and such and, well, I’m not totally sure as to what end she’s trying to accomplish this, but it’s.” Jake takes a breath, shifting nervously between his feet. “It’s no good. She hurt a lot of folks, both human and troll. As we all know.”

“I… I see.” Equius looks taken aback. An understandable reaction. “So I take it that… your brother and his associates were in fact unsuccessful?” he asks you.

“Yeah,” you say, and twine your fingers together to keep them still. There’s enough nervous fidgeting going around without you increasing it. “I… yeah. I guess so.” You’ve barely had time to really reconcile with this thought, that the man you both venerated and hardly remembered and at times despised for leaving you died in vain.

Equius pauses, then says, “Do you have proof of any of this? Not that I doubt your word, Dirk, but I would rather have evidence.”

“I have only my story as proof of myself,” Jake says, an edge to his voice. “If you go looking you’ll find the others who have gone missing over the years. Do you want names? I can give you names, but if you find me unbelievable—”

“I’m vouching for him,” you say quickly. “Jake would never lie about something like this. And I saw him soaked in seawater with a magical storm on his heels. This isn’t the sort of thing you can invent. I know you don’t know him, but you know me, right? We’re not, you know, fucking nestled into the cushy bosom of best buddies or anything, but I like to think you consider me a friend. And we’ve—” You’re talking yourself into a corner and there’s a scowl climbing onto Jake’s face. “Well. Can you take my word for it?”

Equius looks a little overwhelmed. “I. Yes, of course. You’ve shown yourself to be an honest person. Even if I don’t always appreciate the conveyance of your honesty.”

You bite the inside of your lip to suppress a smile. Your swearing has been a point of contention often enough that you’re unoffended. “Thank you,” you say. “I appreciate it.”

He nods, curt and awkward. “I didn’t intend offense,” he says to Jake. “Surely you see that this would be surprising news. I would like to hear the names of your fellow… abductees.”

“It’s fine,” Jake mumbles, and rattles off some names. All new to you, and the majority clearly troll names by the sound and syllabic patterns.

Equius stops him partway through. “Nitram,” he echoes. “Did you say Tavros Nitram?”

“Uh, yeah,” Jake says.

“One moment, please.” Equius retreats into the back of the shop.

You sneak a glance at Jake, who is regarding the floor very focusedly. You have no idea what he’s thinking.

There are a few primary kinds of magic. The trolls have their own skills, animal-speaking and psionics and all sorts of mind powers. Some of them use the sigils that you humans prefer, though it’s not super common. Sigils are a way of exerting deliberate and specific influence over the world. You always found them simple enough, and Jake struggled to use them for many years. The type of magic he found easy was the magic of intuition and emotion, but you have always been leery of the intensity of it.

That being said, you’ve never wanted to tap into your neglected intuitive magic to know what someone is feeling more than you do in this moment. You don’t, obviously, because Jake would feel it and it’s about as rude as walking up to a stranger and rubbing your hands over their face.

“Um,” you say, out of sheer need to break the silence.

“So, are the two of you…” Jake trails off.

“No,” you say quickly. “No, uh. No.” You kick yourself mentally. Jake doesn’t say anything, just nods and continues to stare at the floor.

Equius returns. “I thought so,” he says. “Some years ago, Nitram wrote to me and asked if he could commission a mobility aid from me. I agreed, but he never responded when I asked him to send me measurements.”

“Yeah, Tavvy’s paralyzed,” Jake says quietly.

“There you go, then,” you say. “No need to take our word for it. That’s a bonafide disappearance right there.” Shut up, you tell yourself. “One of will drop by sometime soon, then, when Nepeta’s back. Or maybe one of our other friends will. Thanks for your help.”

“Oh — Dirk,” Equius says, when you start to take a step back towards the door.

“I’ll wait outside,” Jake says, and beats a hasty exit.

“What is it?” you ask.

Equius drums his fingers on the counter, but stops himself when he drives a claw partway into the wood. “Are you... well?” he asks. “Has everything been alright? This whole business seems like it could have come as a shock.”

“I – oh, yeah,” you say. “I’m fine, man. Thanks for checking. I do have to go, though. Lots of ground to cover with telling everyone about Jake. You know. I’ll see you around.”

“Good luck,” he says.

“Yep,” you say, and flee.

Jake is waiting just outside, looking down the street and out over the wharf. You shut the shop door behind you and you look at each other. A hundred things pile up in your mouth. It really is nothing, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s none of your business, I wanted Jane to stop worrying about me. You don’t intend to speak any of them.

“Are you mad?” you ask, cursing yourself even as the words leave your mouth.

Jake sighs. “No, I’m not mad. I know how long I was gone and I don’t want to begrudge you anything that happened because of that. I just wish…”

A breeze spirals off the docks, bringing a stronger smell of fish and a chill that makes you shiver. “Me, too.”

He nods and shoves his hands into the pockets of his old coat. It doesn’t fit quite as well anymore, and there’s a moth hole on one of the sleeves. “Let’s just get on with talking to some more of the town, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” you say, and follow Jake as he turns and heads up farther into the town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so fucking long to write, i had a bad bout of ~~insecurity~~ writer's block. 
> 
> don't kill me over the equius thing? there's nothing more to it than what you see here, really. just dirk having made a vague attempt at flirting and now feeling awkward about it. 
> 
> also, this chapter has a companion piece! [if you're wondering what was in that envelope that dirk hid from jake, wonder no longer.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12029349)


	4. salt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> /rubs hands over face. this chapter was a long time in the making. here you go.
> 
> i want to do a warning for this chapter but, spoilers, so check endnotes if you're worried.

One morning, Jane approaches you with an idea. 

“Harley’s snares,” she says. “Do you know how to build them?” 

You frown and lean back in your chair. “Harley snares? Those whatsits that my grandma invented?” 

“The very same,” she agrees, tapping her fingers against her mug of tea. “Roxy’s mom and Dirk’s brother tried to use them against the Empress, but she sabotaged the snares before they had the chance to use them.” 

“That doesn’t mean they’ll work for us,” you object. “And besides, there’s lots of traps and snares that have been invented. Why risk something that we haven’t seen tested?” 

“The design she used is known, isn’t it? So they’ve been tested, just not against the Empress. And she did her best to make sure they wouldn’t be used against her!” Jane lifts her mug for a sip, but she doesn’t look done talking, so you wait. “And it would be family magic. There’s power in that, especially when so much of this mess is inherited.”

“For Dirk and Roxy moreso than I,” you say, but it’s a halfhearted protest at best. You may have taken years to learn the full truth of your grandma’s death, but you know now how she died. 

Jane snorts. “You nearly married that boy, Jake. I don’t think it’s such a huge stretch to say you could lay claim to at least a little of his familial history, even if you won’t count your own.” 

“Fair enough,” you concede. “So. Snares and family magic.”

“Anything we use will be a gamble, but we need a few more reliable tools on our side.”

She’s right. You all know it. You’ve been spending the past few days throwing around ideas, after all. You chew your lip. “You asked if I could build one.” 

“Or more than one, preferably,” Jane says. “You, Dirk, and Roxy are better engineers than I’ve ever been. If you work together…” 

“I… I don’t know,” you say. “I’d need some sort of blueprint to work from, and I don’t remember if I have any sort of instructions on this specific mechanism. It might be with the things from my grandmother, but I don’t recall for sure. It would be like trying to make something without the recipe, and without knowing what you’re trying to make in the first place, either!” Her expression falls. You hasten to try and explain yourself better. “If I had one or the other I think we could manage it, but as it is, well, I can check the attic and see if I have the notes for it. And Dirk might know. Or Roxy.” 

“Someone say my name?” Roxy asks, sauntering in from the bedroom looking freshly washed. She takes a seat at the table and starts gently combing through her damp hair with her fingers. 

“Do you know how to build a Harley snare?” you ask. 

She frowns. “Might be able to, yeah. Don’t think I know all the steps, but I think I could puzzle it out.” 

“And I’ll make a thorough examination of the attic, pronto, in case I happen to have squirreled the instructions away somewhere,” you promise. 

“Are we using that, then?” Roxy asks. “As an ace up the sleeve?” 

“Jane thought we might try for some family magics,” you say. 

Roxy nods. “Makes sense to me.” She tilts back in her chair. “Hey, so, Jane, I was thinking — hang on. DIRK.” 

“What?” Dirk yells back. 

“Get in here!” Roxy rolls her eyes at the two of you. Dirk emerges shortly from the bedroom as well. 

“Where’s the fire?” he asks. 

“I was thinking,” Roxy says. “Jane, you and me, let’s head down to town and meet up with Miss Nepeta, see what boat she’s willing to lend to the cause. I’m hells of cooped up and I bet poor Jane is too. We stretch our legs and then you boys can start work on the charms while we’re gone. Yeah?” 

Dirk frowns. “Sure? If you want to. I don’t mean to make you do my dirty work.” 

“What, the dirty work of talking to a nice troll who uses too many cat puns?” Roxy dismisses. “Janey?”

“I could use the walk,” Jane admits. 

“There,” Roxy says. “Nice and neat.” She drops all of her chair legs back onto the ground with a thud. “Now I just gotta get my hair to dry a little faster and we can go. Anyone need anything from town?”

“Wire,” you say, turning over the idea of a snare in your mind with your memories of your grandmother. “Lots of wire.”  

You’re still rustling through the dusty corners of your mind for memories, when the girls depart. Dirk raises an eyebrow at you. 

“Charms?” he prompts.

“Yes,” you say, standing up from the table. “Is your charmbox still in the bedroom?” 

“I’ve been lazy about organizing them,” he admits. “I have a couple different stashes where I keep materials for charms that I’m trying to dig up.” He gestures you over and you obligingly join him in your bedroom. In  _ the  _ bedroom, not yours. 

Dirk has on the dresser a collection of little doodads for charmmaking — plain metal disks, buttons, a few pieces of jewelry. “I have a whole box of this shit on the bookcase,” he says. “But I’ve been digging up the random stashes, too. Might as well have all the supplies we can get.” 

“That makes sense,” you say, trying not to touch anything in the room. You haven’t been alone with Dirk for more than a few minutes in days, since he took you up to the attic. “What should I be doing, then?” 

He gestures towards the assortment on his dresser. “No point in getting started on charms until we have it all collected. You want to grab the box off the bookshelf and add these to it while I dig up the rest? Then we can start poking around before the girls get back.” 

“Sure,” you say. Dirk starts picking through his bedside table and you pluck the charmbox off its spot between some of Dirk’s old dog-eared copies of epic poetry. It rattles when you set it down gingerly on the dresser and pop the lid off. Inside is more of the same. You wish Dirk would say something. The silence stretches. 

“Did you hear Jane’s idea?” you ask. “About using Harley snares?” 

He glances back at you. “I didn’t, no. Your grandmother invented those.” 

“Right,” you say. “Jane thinks using something with history — family magic — might help us out.” 

“Family magic,” Dirk echoes. 

“Yes, you know. Imbue the snares with the legacy of struggling against the Empress, how we deserve to win after all we lost. Invoke the memory of my grandma.” 

“Intuitive magic at its finest,” Dirk says. 

“Hardly,” you disagree immediately. “There’s plenty of ways to use my brand of magic that I like much better. This is sad magic, fighting magic, there’s no joy in this. All the best ways to use intuition are the happy ones. Soothing magic, or sharing delights, or…” 

You trail off as Dirk, without looking over at you, carefully extends a little tendril of his self and taps lightly on your mind. Trying to respond with equal care so you don’t snatch at his mind with the desperation you’ve been trying to neatly bottle away, you open up to him. 

Dirk is amused by your impassioned defense of this exact form of magic. You absorb the feeling quietly, let it fill you to the brim, and then gently let him go. 

“Yes,” you say, when you think you have your voice under control. It still wobbles a little. Oh well. “That kind. Glad to see you still know how to use it.” 

“Just isn’t my favorite,” Dirk says. “Too personal.” 

Yes, you know. It was late in your time together that you coaxed him into sharing minds. He’s not wrong. It’s very personal. Used like this, it's as intimate as a caress across infrequently bared skin. Dirk turns around with a handful of charms and flushes at whatever expression is written across your face. 

“Didn't mean to make it weird,” he mutters. 

You have to clear your throat before you can speak. “You didn't, it’s all copacetic. You're welcome in my mind.” 

He nods, stiff and uncertain still. You pick up the charmbox and offer it up to him. Obligingly he draws closer to add to the collection of treasures, and sneaks a glance at you. He takes another step closer to you. 

“Dirk,” you say, half a question, and he comes all the way into your space to kiss you. 

At the first brush of his lips, you fumble to set the box down again on the dresser without looking, wanting your hands free to pull him close. Dirk breaks the kiss before it can grow, hides his face against your cheek. 

“I don't care anymore. I don't give a shit about — waiting, or whatever. I missed you too much.” He speaks the words as if confessing a crime. “I don't think I could stand to lose you twice, but I want to have you again anyway, even if it means I have to risk losing you.” 

You blink back the threat of tears. “Kiss me again,” you plead. 

He does, and there's nothing brief about this kiss. It's long and lingering, with a hint of sorrow behind it that you're determined to kiss out of his mouth. You've caused Dirk too much sadness, regardless of your degree of culpability. He deserves something good from you, and a decent kiss is as good a place to start as any. 

You intend to end the kiss before you can get carried away, but Dirk hums and sways into you, tilting his head for another kiss when you pause to take a breath, and you lose yourself. You fist a hand in his shirt and when Dirk’s tongue drags questioningly across your bottom lip you give as good as you get, licking into his mouth until you earn yourself a low, pleased sound from Dirk’s throat. It’s intoxicating to be so close to him. You’re dizzy with it. 

Dirk pulls you toward him and you stagger forward a step. He sits down on the bed and reaches for you again. You hesitate. His face, turned up to you in dazed open hopefulness, starts to close off. 

“You’re sure?” you check. 

Dirk rolls his eyes so hard you’re surprised they don’t pop out like marbles and roll off to some dusty corner. “Yeah, I’m fucking sure. I want you.” 

“Alright, you can hardly fault a fellow for making certain we’re on the same page, can you?” You bend to kiss the wrinkle out of his forehead and start on the buttons of his shirt. He works on divesting you of your own as well and then crawls back further up the bed the moment you’re both free of your shirts. You follow, and settle yourself in his lap. He immediately tilts his head back for another kiss and you are glad to oblige him, at least until you can’t restrain your desire to relearn the rest of his body with your lips any longer. He shivers delightfully when you kiss down the line of his throat. 

“Lay down for me, will you?” you ask against his collarbone. “I want a proper look at you.” 

“How could I reject such a polite request,” he replies and settles back against the blankets, propped up on his elbows and watching you curiously. You do want to look at him. Some of his youthful softness has diminished in these past long years, though he's certainly no less a feast for the eyes because of it. There's a scar on his side that is new to you, much pinker than his faded twin surgical scars. You trace it curiously. 

“Fell while doing some repairs,” Dirk says. “It wasn't a serious injury, though it hurt enough to feel like one.” 

“I'm glad it wasn't serious,” you say. Your throat is tight with the irrational wish that you could have been there to ease his healing. To distract yourself, you consider the more familiar shape of his fertility prevention tattoo over his lower belly. You think to kiss it, but then catch the expression on Dirk’s face. 

Oh. You'd nearly forgotten your own scars, having grown too used to them. It was five years ago you received them, after all. But you know they’ll be there if you craned your neck down, standing out starkly against your dark skin. You and Dirk nearly match now, you think with your stomach twisting over in distress and embarrassment. 

“It's how she casts whatever magic it is that keeps us alive, I’m fairly certain,” you say hurriedly. “The scars, I mean, the ones on my ribs.”

“Did she cut into your lungs,” Dirk asks, tone too flat to pass for calm. 

The pain is long faded in your memory, but still, you don't want to think about it, you don't. “It was a long time ago,” you say. Dirk does not look dissuaded from pursuing this line of conversation, so you bend to kiss him again. “Let's not discuss it right now,” you say against his mouth. When you feel the argument drain from him you move to kiss the hollow of his throat, then his chest. You devote a moment to each of his nipples, which are far too tempting to go unlicked. Once his breath shudders audibly you press your lips to his stomach, then to his new scar, then over his tattoo, situating yourself directly over the topmost button of his pants. 

“Oh,” Dirk says dazedly, catching on to your intentions. 

“Oh indeed,” you say, rubbing a thumb over the sharp edge of one of his hip bones. “I believe I always did my best persuasion with the actions of my tongue.” 

Your lovely, lovely Dirk snorts out a laugh. “And what are you trying to persuade me of, exactly?”

“To remember why you once kept me around,” you say, mostly teasing but with a kernel of truth to the words that must leak through, judging by how Dirk’s eyes soften. 

“Well, let it not be said I didn't give you a chance to make your arguments,” he says, shifting his legs to give you room. You smile and make quick work of the fastening of his pants and pull them off over his legs, and then, more carefully, remove his underpants as well. Naked, he shivers, but looks at you with such trust that you ache to your core. 

You kick the rest of your own clothes off as well but settle on your stomach to mouth slowly up the length of his thigh, his leg hairs tickling your lips. The muscles under your mouth tense and then relax as you move along them. Dirk takes a steadying breath when you encourage one of his legs to bend more with gentle pressure. 

“You alright?” you check. 

“Mmhm, yeah,” Dirk says, and hooks his leg over your shoulder. 

You accept this subtle hint as an impetus to keep going and nose against the wiry darker blond hairs between Dirk’s legs. At the first flicker of your tongue Dirk blurts out, “Oh,  _ fuck _ ,” and you fight down a grin as you slide your tongue between his labia to part them. You get your first taste of his slick and hum as you shift your attentions a bit higher to the swell of his dick. While not particularly long at all, you think it is perfectly respectable and more importantly great fun to lick.

Dirk moans when you suck him gently and cross your heart and stick a needle in your eye if you don’t want to make him feel so good that he forgets that anything painful exists in the world. You throw yourself into your self-appointed task with abandon, alternating between licking and sucking in a pattern that makes Dirk’s legs tremble. He's so beautifully warm and alive, more so than your imagination could ever conjure up. 

You never want to be parted from him again, just stay here like this forever and keep him for yourself, but you can't, so you bring your hand up and slide a finger into him slowly. Dirk says your name, “Jake, Jake, fuck Jake  _ please _ ,” and when you curl your finger towards yourself his thighs go tense around you. 

Gods, you want to crawl inside him or eat him alive or something, maybe just have him wrap you in his arms and never let go. He's so warm. You'd forgotten how warm another person can be. 

You'd happily continue to lick him to incoherency for hours, but Dirk is only human, can only be wound up so far before he shakes to pieces. You get some good long minutes to taste him and make him rock against your face before your memory of his body tells you he's close to orgasm. When he digs his heel into your back for more leverage, you fit a second finger in beside the first and crook them against where he's sensitive and suck until he goes stiff and his dick pulses under your tongue and a whisper of a whine sneaks out of his throat. 

You work him through it, feel how he squeezes you and trembles desperately. Finally you release him when he goes limp and shivers against the quilts. 

“Fuck,” he says. “Just — fuck, you're good at that.” 

You laugh a little and wipe your arm across your face. He reaches down and you crawl up to kiss him. When you draw back, there's a wet smear on his chin from his own slick. 

He runs a thumb under your eye, rubbing away the dampness. “Were you crying?” he asks. 

You shake your head and hide your face against his cheek. “Not really.” 

“Hmm,” he says, and rolls his hips up against you. You were so focused on him that you barely registered your own arousal, but you feel it now like a shock. 

“Can I…” you ask. 

“I want you to fuck me,” Dirk says. “If that's what you were about to ask.” 

“Well, if you're not too sensitive,” you say, shifting with him until his legs are hooked over your hips. 

“Don't care,” he says. “I'd ride you if I thought my legs would work at all, but someone's gone and turned me into a limp noodle.” 

You laugh. “Lucky for you limp noodles really jolly my rogers.” You brace yourself on one arm so you can line yourself up. Dirk’s eyelids flutter as you press in, breath stuttering. He's so  _ warm _ , relaxed and open, and it's just a slick steady slide into his body. It feels good in a way that you'd almost forgotten your body could feel. You kiss him desperately as you rock together, in and out, until you can’t muster the brainpower to concentrate on kissing properly and bury your face into the side of his neck. All of his skin tastes equally good, anyway. 

Dirk gasps with you as you move, fingers digging into your back, sometimes making little punched-out noises. You want to hear more of those. You push yourself up onto one elbow so you can fit your hand between your hips and rub back and forth on the hood of his dick, and Dirk whines, clenching tight around you. “Yeah, fuck,” he groans. 

“Yeah?” you echo. “Do you want — want to bet I can make you come twice?” 

Dirk splutters out a surprised cough of laughter. “Like you’ll even last that long,” he retorts. 

“Libel and slander,” you say, and bend to nip his collarbone. 

He digs his nails into your side in reproach. “Alright, big talker, do your worst.” 

You do your  _ best _ to work him up again. You find the angle for your hips he likes the most, work your thumb over him in a motion intended for no teasing, just a relentless steady build, and mouth across his throat. When he squirms and tries to pull his head back farther into the pillow, you chase him and suck under his jaw and up to his ear, dig your teeth in where his skin is most sensitive, then lick over the spots you aggravate to soothe them. You fuck him until he starts to shake again. 

He grabs you by the hair to drag you up to kiss him again and moans into your mouth. He pants and clutches you close and you kiss him with the same desperate desire a person can have for air when they’re drowning. You feel the little shivers break out all over him before he twists his face away and cries out and pulses against you, around you. You fuck him through it until his voice breaks, and then you slow, moving your hand back to the bed to brace yourself more comfortably over him. 

“Fuck,” Dirk moans. 

“Two for two,” you say. 

“Fuck you.” He shudders with the aftershocks and you wait until— “I’m good, you can keep going.” 

“Alright,” you say, and stay propped up to watch him twitch with overstimulation. He stays slumped against the mattress, letting the force of your body move through him, as you let the heat build in you, bottom lip caught beneath your teeth. Your breathing grows ever more ragged and then Dirk looks at you and you come from the sharp, shocking exhilaration of the brightness of his eyes. 

“Shit,” you hear yourself choke out, and finally collapse next to him. Dirk runs a soothing hand over your side. You both catch your breaths. 

“I’m going to be fucking sore,” Dirk mutters at last. “Two orgasms, what was I thinking.” He shifts and sighs. “Worth it, though.” 

You reach over without looking and hook him closer. He curls against your side with a surprised noise. You can’t look at him. If you look you’ll cry. 

“Hey,” Dirk says softly. “It’s okay.” 

You run a thousand phrases through your head, all unable to capture the depth of what you wish you could express to him. So instead you keep quiet and breathe slowly. Dirk doesn’t press it, and you’re grateful for that. 

“Shower?” you ask at last. 

“Sounds good,” he says. 

There's a solemnity as you clean up. You fix the mussed blankets and open a window to clear out some of the distinct musk of sex in the air while Dirk tries to rub a spot out of the quilt with a grimace. The shower you share is fairly brief, just to wash the sweat and fluids off. You offer to wash Dirk’s hair but he says it’s already clean. The kiss you share afterward is chaste but achingly sweet, and you rub your thumb over the love bites you unthinkingly left on him. 

Dirk gifts you with a tiny smile. “Charmwork?” he says. “So the girls can’t say we completely lazed around without them to run the show.” 

“Yes… wait, no. I need to check the attic, go through my grandma’s things.” You sigh as the weight of your plans sinks back over you. “Can you get started without me?” 

He nods, and retrieves the abandoned charmbox. You ascend to the attic. 

Your grandma’s old notebooks and papers are familiar to you in a distant sort of way. You used to page through them when you were little, trying to connect with the woman you now scarcely remember. They were too scientific for you at the time, and when you grew older there were her published experiments for you to pour over. Now you sit yourself down with the old papers, a little yellowed with age that even the best preservation sigils can’t hold off forever, and look for a hint of anything snare-like. 

There’s a lot of notes written in her cheerful, looping hand. Some make little to no sense. Many are records of the plants she loved to tend. The first notebooks you flip through are too early, you determine, kept before she joined forces with the trolls and other humans who wished to bring down the Empress. 

The next one you pick up has a reference to a woman you think must be Roxy’s mother, and you pay more attention to the pages as you scan them. You recognize this part. Grandma helped document the observations of a troll woman who tended the troll’s mother grub to learn about the damage the Empress had done to prevent the hatching of any more seadwellers. You feel your heart pick up when you turn the page to find a sketch of one of the contraptions she built to try and track the Empress. You hadn’t expected this to work, not at all, but several pages later you find preliminary sketches for a snare made of long, twisting wires meant to be carried in the hand and wrap around a target to bind them up. 

There are some notes, but it’s not the finished design. You mark the page and check the rest of the books and papers with no further luck. Still. With this, there’s a chance you can replicate it. Intuition can fill gaps that logic can’t follow. 

You pick up the notebook and hug it to your chest with one arm as you descend back to your bedroom, and let yourself feel a little flutter of hope. 

 

* * *

 

Roxy and Jane return after a while in a startling tumble of nervous energy, disturbing the quiet concentration of the charmmaking. Dirk sets down his ritual knife and you lose the energy you’d collected in a scattered rush, leaving the charm in your hand only half-inscribed. Jane is carrying a cloth bag with the end of a spool of wire poking out that she drops on the floor unceremoniously. 

“There’s been a potential complication,” she says. “Jake, can you come here, please?” 

Alarmed, you get up and cross to her. She points out the front door. 

“There’s a ship anchored out in the water,” she says. “Do you recognize it?” 

You stand in the doorway and look out and down the hill to the ocean, glittering with weak winter sunlight. You’re confused for a long moment, but then dread drops into your stomach like a blow. 

“Mindfang,” you say softly. 

Roxy groans and slumps against the wall. “Thought so,” she says. “We saw the ship on the way to town, didn’t think shit of it, but there was someone wondering whose it was. Asked around and nobody knew, and I started thinking, well, fuck, if I was out there swimming around like I was trying to give fuchsia a bad name and knowing we could be plotting something, I’d call in my allies, right?” 

You step back and shut the door, then without a word go and close the bedroom window. No point in tempting fate, though if she was planning on summoning up another tempest she’d have done so by now. You return and your friends all look at you. 

“So we deal with Mindfang first,” Dirk says. “Fine, just another step in the plan. Sneak onboard somehow, then take her out.” 

“How?” you ask tiredly. All of your quiet contentment has drained right on out of you. “Trolls are nocturnal, and she’ll have a sentry watching the waters by day. You’ll be hard pressed to be sneaky enough.” 

“We’ll think of a way,” Roxy says. You resist the urge to find somewhere you can make yourself small and curl up. 

“I think I can manage the snare,” you say to Jane instead. 

“Good,” she says. She looks worn down. “We have a boat. Nepeta was very nice.” 

“Okay,” you say, trying to swallow down the hysteria that floats in your mind alongside the image of Mindfang’s face. “Okay. I’ll — I’ll make the snare. You three can finish the charms and decide what to do about the pirate ship darkening our doorstep.” 

They accept this course of action, looking about as unfooted as you feel. You get your bag of wires and your notebook, and sit yourself down on the couch so you have room to think. Spread them out in front of you. Intuition, emotion, positive feelings for a positive outcome. You squinch your eyes, just for a moment. 

The others linger by the table. You watch covertly as Jane picks over the charms. Roxy tilts Dirk’s head to the side to poke at the bruises you left on him with half-hearted humor and he swats her away. 

Then he comes over to you. “Hey,” he says quietly, and puts a hand on your shoulder. “You can do this.” 

You look up at him, throat tight. “Thanks.” 

He leaves you to it after squeezing your shoulder. You inhale slowly, then blow it out. 

Right. Positive feelings. Memory of your grandma. A whole bunch of wire that needs convincing to take shape. You take one last look at your grandma’s notes, shut your eyes, and reach deep inside yourself for the well of magic. Then you pick up the first spool of wire and start to fumble your way to an understanding of how this snare wants to become. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: oral and vaginal sex on and with a trans guy. don't wanna surprise anyone with that if it could get you.


	5. rime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> /flings this at ao3 and runs away

The sky is a hazy pale grey, the air clinging with sharp cold to your exposed cheeks and hands. Your breath hangs heavy in the air when you exhale and turn to look at your friends. Roxy looks subdued in the early morning light, hands tucked into her armpits for warmth. Jane is fidgeting with the charms attached to the tight-fitting cuffs clasped around her upper arms. Jake looks at you nervously, but with resolve that helps ease your own nerves.

“This is the boat, right?” you ask.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Roxy mutters. “In we go, off to our not-certain dooms.”

“Don’t be a sourpuss,” Jane says, and bravely steps forward first to clamber carefully from the dock and into the boat. You gesture for Roxy and Jake to hop in first and then unwind the rope holding the boat to the dock. The waves lap gently against the boat, only adding to the sense of stillness in the air. You toss the rope in and then jump in yourself, lightly as you can manage.

“I’ll start the motor,” Roxy says. The rest of you gingerly find places to sit. Jake has the Harley Snare balanced in his lap and you set your brother’s sword along the side of the boat, where hopefully nobody will step on it. Roxy carries no weapon visibly: she levies offensive magic like nobody’s business, even if water isn’t her best element. Jane has a pair of long-handled metal spoons she borrowed from your own kitchen, one tucked away and one out for her to inspect a final time. She’d sat yesterday in front of your fireplace with an odd sharp tool you’ve only seen her use a few times, etching her sigils into them with slow methodicalness until they were to her satisfaction.

( _Metal,_ she’d told you, _carries a strong relationship to fire. It’s earth, changed by the forces of heat and magic. A passably good antithesis for water._ You had known this already, but recognized that her worry could be soothed by explaining. You hadn’t liked to see the lines of fear on her forehead.)

You also know that Roxy and Jake are each carrying a dagger, from a matched set of Jake’s that you’d unearthed from the bottom of one of his boxes. They’ve been sharpened, but otherwise had survived the years undamaged. As Roxy hums the boat’s engine to life with fixed concentration, you take a steading breath and try to stop counting the points you have tallied up in your favor. You don’t know that this will work, but you want it to very badly in many ways but particularly from a small, child part of yourself that still mourns the loss of your only family.

“Up and running,” Roxy says. “Dirk, ready to take over?”

“Got it,” you say, and shift to take her place to steer. The boat rumbles with energy beneath you and when you place a hand on the steering wheel it catches ahold of you. With another slow exhale, you let the discomfort move through you and begin to direct the boat forward, out of its docking place and out into the harbor. When you’re far enough into open water that you feel safe dropping your eyes to check on everyone again, you find Jake watching you, silent and a little fearful. Not sure how to help, you raise an eyebrow at him questioningly. He smiles back tremulously.

Roxy has settled onto the bottom of the boat, preparing to meditate. She pulls her dark clothes in closer around her. “Why’d we have to do this in the winter,” she grumbles under her breath. “Cold and foggy and damp as all hell.”

“You’re the one who willingly works in subzero temperatures,” Jane says pointedly. “Do focus, would you?”

“All right, don’t get your panties twisted.” Roxy lays her hands flat on the wood of the boat. She has a talent for swiftness and sly movements, always has. If she concentrates well enough and for long enough, she won’t make you invisible, but she might make you slip by unremarked upon. You stay silent to help her concentrate.

The fog is in your favor. You know (mostly) where you’re trying to go, and where you’re trying to avoid to get past Mindfang. So, if you can stick to the route and get close enough to where you need to be before the dawn burns off the worst of the fog, you have a better shot.

Providing that you don’t fuck up and lose track of where you’re trying to go. You wiggle your fingers at Jake and he slides over to take them. The boat hums more sharply for a moment as it catches hold of him as well. The feeling is briefly nauseating: the alien mindlessness of the boat on one side and Jake’s warm, familiar self on the other. You are the lodestone in the center, meant to be immovable, so that Jake can provide the boat with the instinct of direction to take.

The flickers of his thoughts lean darkly for a minute, memories of heavy, heavy water and distorted sound, but then he settles into the memory of surfacing, how he’d swum a ways underwater to rise slowly from the depths and then let the shore call him home. How the night had stung the salt in his eyes when he breathed his first lungful of oxygen in five years. He’d risen from beneath the waves: where? Above the canyon, of course. The boat remembers, too, and follows the call onward.

The minutes pass quickly at first as you struggle to maintain the evenness necessary to let Jake flow through you. He can’t do this sort of thing directly, is the trouble. The boat’s making is all meant for the direct type of magic that most people use, day to day, the same type that Jake has always struggled to make work. He needs a conduit, whatever it may be. After years of failure he’d come up with the searing light he uses for the rare times he does need to cast a sigil, but for the most part he’s found workarounds. You helped him come up with many of them.

He squeezes your hand, and you squeeze back. His fingers are cold. The warming charms you’re all wearing will activate once you’re submerged in the water. For now, you wish idly that you’d thought to lend him a pair of gloves.

The rhythm of the boat eventually becomes steady enough that Jake sighs and rests his head on your shoulder. Roxy hasn’t stirred in a long time, and when you look out at the ocean around you, there’s an odd blurring to the edges of where it laps against your boat. Jane is still and silent, her face set and determined. The boat hums on, and the sun slowly begins to rise. First it’s just the increasing suggestion of lightness in the air, and then a pinkening to the clouds. The fog is not as heavy anymore, and you can see the distance horizon where the sky meets the sea, the darkest part of the sky remaining. Jane turns to watch the sun slowly creep over the far-off mountains until the light hits clear across her face.

_How much farther?_ you ask the memory held between Jake and the boat.

The answer comes back complicated, a bodily sense of distance rather than a logical unit of measurement. Some distance, still, but you’re getting closer. Mindfang’s ship was closer to your home than the town’s harbor, which may yet be what gets you past her.

You try not to let the need for haste and urgency sweep over you, and rest your head on Jake’s in turn. His thumb traces the back of your knuckles.

After this, should you survive. Maybe you shouldn’t think of it yet. There’s no guarantee that you will prevail, really. But. If you do… You can admit to yourself that there’s no chance that you’ll tell Jake there’s no room for him in the home you always meant to share. He’ll be hard pressed to so much as get you to let him out of your sight, if you’re going for full honesty. Maybe that’s all right. The grip Jake has on your mind right now is hardly a reluctant one. You’d kissed once, earlier in your kitchen after breakfast, for luck and… just in case you didn’t have another chance. Jake seems to sense the turn your thoughts are taking, because he squeezes your hand again.

Time trickles on. The sun rises fully away from the mountains and the morning grows brighter. You keep an eye out for any hint of Mindfang’s ship. There — in the distance. You’re drawing nearer to it. Not directly so — your destination is farther from land than her boat is. But you don’t like that you can see her ship one bit. Roxy is still sitting in perfect meditation, and the waves still hit your boat hazily.

You sharpen your focus on the boat’s engine and give into the urge to edge your speed up just a little. If you had to, from here, you could dive and swim the rest of the distance, but it would be an expenditure of energy that would much better be preserved. Charms do, eventually, wear out, though you all have more spares than you should conceivably need.

“Nearly there,” Jake breathes out. Jane stands carefully, stepping to the seats at the bow of the boat, and opens the storage compartment below to pull out the anchor and line. The canyon is near. You can feel its yawning energy through Jake and stop the boat’s engine when you’re still far enough away that you won’t risk passing over it when you drop anchor. The waves push you back from the spot you want. Good.

You leave Jake’s side to help Jane double-check that the bitter end of the line is secured to the boat. The length you need was pre-measured by Roxy with Nepeta’s help. Then, you heave the anchor up and lower it overboard. Roxy’s eyes open at the splash. You let the line out slowly, cinch it off to let the anchor set, and when you confirm that it has you start letting the line out again. The tension in the air from everyone watching you is actually fucking killing you.

Finally, finally, you confirm that you’re set. You strip off your unnecessary layers and your shoes. Roxy moves slowest, trying to maintain your relatively hidden passage, but you can tell that her concentration is faltering. You’re almost underwater and then it won’t matter.

“Fuck,” Roxy mutters. “Sorry, I need to drop our hiddenness.” The waves hit your boat with a much louder slap. She tugs her boots off quickly. Jake leans over the side of the boat to look down into the water.

“See anything?” you ask him. You retrieve your sword and sheath it on your back, then move to the stern and look toward the no-longer distant shape of Mindfang’s ship. If they look now, they’ll see your boat. Maybe they’ll assume you’re just fishermen out for business, but you won’t count on that.

“Just water,” Jake says. His voice is strained. When you look back at him, you see that his expression is tight with something that you’re pretty sure is fear.

“Hey—” you start, trying to think of words to reassure him.

There’s a long, whistling noise, and then the water between you and Mindfang explodes.

“Dive!” Roxy yells. She and Jane launch themselves over the side as you grab Jake and jump.

The two of you crash into the water without time to prepare. Saltwater goes up your nose, stinging, and you push the feeling aside so you can swim down as fast as possible. Another explosive hits the water, nearer. The impacts reverberate all around you. Jake wrestles his arm away but sticks close to you as you dive. Roxy and Jane are doing the same, you see in your peripherals. You swim down and away from Mindfang, lungs burning, and with a sudden shock you see the edge of the canyon, dark and not so far off along the sandy bottom.

Roxy reaches you, Jane on her heels. She swims up to you and pokes you in the chest until you realize that you’re holding your breath like a dumbass who forgot he had a waterbreathing charm around his throat. You gulp in seawater and feel it turn to air in your throat. It’s a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, especially with how the salt stings your mouth, but it does the trick. Flipping back around, you see the bottom of your boat bobbing in the shockwaves from the explosions.

Roxy tries to speak, her voice too distorted by the water to understand. She claps a hand to the charms around her neck and makes a face, moving her lips a few times before she gets the hang of it.

“Mindfang,” she says. “Her ship was shooting at us.”

“I noticed,” you reply tightly, concentrating on letting the charm sync up with your voice. You hope the boat doesn’t get sunk. Swimming all the way back to shore would, frankly, suck.

Jake grabs your hand again and grips it hard. His nails dig into your skin and you look over at him. He looks a little wild eyed. In his other hand he’s still clutching the tangled wires of the snare.

“Are you okay?” you ask him.

He nods, not meeting your eyes. “We should keep moving,” he says. “There’s nothing nearby that can’t feel the explosions.”

“You lead the way,” Jane says. She looks a little frightened, too, but is wearing her look of steely-eyed determination. “You know the best route.”

“All right,” Jake says. He lets go of you to turn himself and start swimming the rest of the way down to the canyon, and the three of you follow suit. You’re grateful for the charms you made for strength and endurance. For now you’ll be fine, but you could be down here for a while.

The explosions stop, eventually. Hopefully Mindfang keeps her landdweller ass on her ship and not in the water. Without them the water is even eerier. This time of year the water is always cold as balls, cold enough to turn your feet numb if you venture in for a wade, but it’s a placid, creepy non-temperature against your skin. When you reach the edge of the canyon you have to admit that you’re unnerved. It’s deep, and dark, and creepy as hell. You can’t imagine spending years with it gaping below you.

Jake halts you here. “The cages are in a branch off of the main canyon,” he reminds you all. “We’ll follow the rim along up here until we snoop out whereabouts it peels off, if that still sounds hunky-dory to everyone.” It’s too difficult to get a read on him down here, but you think you know him well enough still to guess that if you were home, his hands would be shaking.

You all agree to keep following him. You’re glad now that your plan didn’t call for you to swim in the canyon itself, even if you do feel painfully exposed just on the open expanse of the seabed. Jake uses the rocky edge of the canyon to propel himself along and you follow suit, keeping as close on his heels as you can without getting kicked in the face. A glance back confirms that the girls are hot on your tail as well. Roxy grins at you with vicious resolve when she catches your eye.

You swim for what feels like an age, though you know logically it isn’t more than twenty minutes, before suddenly up ahead the ground cuts away from the main canyon with a steeply pitched smaller branch. Jake nearly backpedals into you and you grab his foot to stop him from kicking you.

"This is it,” Jake says. "Just… Down there a ways.”

You squeeze his ankle and release him, then turned to look back at the girls. Roxy gives you a thumbs-up.

“We have a plan,” Jane says sharply. “Let's stick to it.”

Jake nods. You can sense his trepidation, but he uses the edge of the canyon to push off and propel himself down. Even with your protective charms, you can feel the heaviness of the water. And it's dark, the early morning light much too distilled at this depth for you to be able to see far. You can't imagine living trapped down here.

Much less in a cage.

Built into the sides of the canyon wall, twisted shapes of metal and stone, the first cages emerge from the gloomy half-light. The first ones you can see are empty, and Jake uses the bars of one for propulsion. Then, the fourth cage. It's built under a jutting section of rock, casting it into further darkness, and huddled within it is the shape of a troll.

You find that you don't want to touch the cages, make them real and tangible under your hands, but Jake swims right up to it without hesitation. He puts two fingers to his throat and calls out, warbling and uncertain through the distortion of the water as he readjusts to the charm again, “Miss Pyrope! It's me, Jake.”

The troll’s head comes up with a snap and she moves so suddenly that you almost recoil. “Jake?” she says, and reaches out unerringly through the bars to grab Jake. “You're back.”

“I brought my friends,” he says. “We’re here to set you free.”

“Idiot,” she says, and releases him. Her eyes are blank, flat red. She's blind. “You’re all she’s talked about since you left. Coming back was a mistake.”

“Thank me later,” Jake retorts. “Roxy, come take a look-see at how I get this contraption to bend.”

Roxy joins him at the bars of the cage. Jake determined that she has the best chance of learning how to open the cages, as you and Jane have always had more trouble with the non-concrete types of magic. Earlier with the boat was a much easier task for you, to just help Jake give his instincts a framework. You float next to Jane's side and watch silently as Jake falls into a meditative state, his eyes shut, one hand on the bars and the other holding Roxy's. The troll girl you'd heard Jake call Pyrope presses herself back against the canyon wall warily. Each passing second wrings your nervousness higher. The longer this takes, the more likely it is that you'll be caught.

The water around Jake abruptly begins to glow faintly, as if little particles previously invisible in the water suddenly turned to solid gold. The color is his trademark: you'd know it anywhere. You hold your breath instinctively and watch as the bars waver and twist away under his hands. Roxy reaches through and grabs Pyrope's arm, helps her guide herself out through the hole.

"Did you get it?" Jake asks Roxy.

Roxy pulls a face. "I think so," she says. "Give me one more shot with you and I think I'll have it."

"Every single one of you is crazy," Pyrope says. She's digging her fingers into Roxy's arm hard. You see Roxy wince. Then her face splits into a wide, unsettlingly toothy grin. "What's the plan?"

"We're getting everyone free, and whoever wants to can go back up to the surface. There's a boat," Jake says. "Then... then we're going to kill her."

"A most excellent plan," Pyrope says.

"Also there's a pirate ship up there," Jake adds. "Mindfang."

"I can handle that," she says. "Get everyone free and we'll go deal with Miss Blueberry Tar."

"We should keep moving," Jane interjects. "There's a lot of cages to get through!"

"Yes, yes, right." Jake twists in the water to look down the rest of the canyon. There's another troll a few feet down, watching you with creepy, silent desperation. "Come on, then."

The next few cages go faster, and Roxy gets it down and starts opening them, too. You and Jane urge everyone you're freeing to stay quiet so you can remain as stealthy as possible. It's going better than you expected. Every moment down here in this creepy half-lit dungeon is a moment too long.

You're swimming ahead to warn the other prisoners that they're being freed when a claws hand shoots out from between the bars and seizes your shirt, dragging you close.

"Hey!" you say, forgetting to be quiet, trying to pull away. The troll glares at you. "What the fuck, man. We're freeing you."

"Dirk," the troll says accusingly. "You're Dirk Strider."

"Uh," you say. "Have we met?"

"Karkat!" Jake swoops in reproachfully, having spotted your predicament. "For frig's sake, let him go."

The troll -- Karkat -- releases you. "English," he says. "You should have stayed gone."

"Everyone keeps saying that, but I didn't, I'm back and we're here to rescue you," Jake snaps. "Stand back and I'll let you out."

Karkat pushes off the bars, moving away from Jake, and turns his scowl back on you. "I could probably recite your life story to you," he says. "Jake is an obnoxious shithead who couldn't fucking shut up about you if you paid him."

"I, uh, okay," you say. You have no idea how to respond to that.

"Shut up," Jake grumbles without heat. "Like you weren't hanging onto my every word, you romance-obsessed fiend."

“Romance-obsessed fiend! That’s fucking rich, coming from the guy who could tell me every detail of dates he’d gone on years ago as if he’d just returned home from them, puffed up on the glory of a successful—”

“So Jake told you about us,” you say. “Doesn’t mean you really know shit, does it?”

Karkat bares his teeth at you. It isn’t very threatening. “Listen, douchesack,” he says. “I know my shit better than god damn Troll Casanova and you’d better believe it.”

“I’m sure,” you say. Then, to Jake: “I’m going to go help Roxy. You seem like you’ve got it covered here.” It’s a tactical retreat. Jake looked too flustered to concentrate.

By the time everyone is freed and accounted for, you’re itching to know exactly how much time has passed. The sun has risen more, you can tell, as it’s not quite as dim and dark as it was when you first entered the water. Everyone is a mix of tense and exhilarated with your success so far.

“Okay, listen up,” Roxy says, projecting her voice with a quick-burning charm that disintegrates in her hand as she speaks. “We’re going after the Empress now. Anyone who wants to help is welcome, but if you’re injured or don’t want to, there’s a boat up on the surface that we brought. The pirate Mindfang and her ship are also up there, so no matter what you choose, be careful, alright?”

All the prisoners seem to be paying attention to her, and Jane is busy tending to some girl’s injured arm. You look around at the now-empty cages, contorted and still gleaming with the magic it took to bend the bars despite the Empress’s seals on them. Jake and Roxy did a good job. You wonder which of these cells was Jake’s, where it was that he spent the past miserable five years. A few groups of the prisoners are breaking off, heading up and away, back to the freedom of the air and land.

You frown, and cast around again.

“Jane,” you call. She looks at you sharply. “Where’s Jake?”

The two of you look again. You still don’t see him. The shock of fear that strikes you freezes you to the core.

“Roxy!” Jane says, getting her attention. You spin around in a circle, then swim down a little further along the cages. Still no sign of him. You reach into your mind and extend out, wobbly, trying to feel him and grab hold.

From somewhere ahead, beyond where you can see, Jake grabs you back, terrified.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote a prequel type thing about how dirk and jake got together, [if you're interested.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13033479)
> 
> also happy holidays if that's your thing


End file.
